Hello everyone !
Today we're going to talk about Silicon Valley!
Innovative start-ups, from 1 to 4 players and from 14 years old for 60 to 90 minutes, stand out to make your project succeed!
Silicon Valley is a business management game based on action choice, resource management and engine building mechanics. The game continues over an indefinite number of rounds until a player's business reaches a value of one billion dollars (= VPs).
A round is made up of two phases. One where each player, in turn, performs 3 actions from a choice of 8 actions. And one where companies will receive their income in resources and PVs and will have to pay their costs (employee salaries, infrastructure costs and research and development of their products).
The players will therefore essentially build an engine where they will hire employees who will produce work in the form of polyominoes which they will be able to spend to manufacture products which will earn them VPs or to invest in venture capital (VC) in order to earn money and small bonuses to optimize.
By paying money, companies will be able to hire employee cards (available on a river of cards) which will produce, directly and on each turn, certain types of polyominoes. You will use these polyominoes to invent new products. These products are represented by large cards representing a diagram that will have to be filled with polyominoes.
When you choose to carry out the action of inventing a new product, you must have the space in your company to be able to produce it, and you must place your polyominoes there in order to fill all the boxes on the product card. You will then gain VPs and a little money directly as well as each turn, in the form of income.
The really cool thing is that other players can also launch the same product as you. Obviously, the first to invent a product has a greater bonus than the followers but it is not uninteresting to be a follower. Indeed, when you launch a product invented by someone else, the inventor's income at each turn will drastically decrease while yours will be higher. You will therefore have an interest in launching as quickly as possible the same product as that invented by one of your opponents. But to do this, you will have to place exactly the same combination of polyominoes used by its inventor.
So there will be a game where when you are able to invent a product, you will try to do it with a combination of polyominoes that your opponents will have difficulty reproducing (paying attention to those produced by their employees).
We are therefore dealing with a double race. A race to be the first to invent a product while being careful to compose it with polyominoes that are more difficult to reproduce, and a race to reproduce as quickly as possible the products invented by your opponents. Succulent and quite unique in its own right as a mechanic. The players themselves will define the objectives of their opponents.
Each player, in turn, can therefore carry out 3 actions out of the 8 possible. And what are these actions? 1/ Hire employees who will produce polyominoes (which represent work force and creativity). 2/ Buy polyominoes 3/ Invent new products using these polyominoes (they are essentially the ones that will earn you VPs). 4/ Expand your business to be able to hire more employees and produce more products.
5/Invest in venture capital to earn the money needed to pay the various costs (employee engagement, employee salary, business expansion and business maintenance). 6/Poach an employee working for a competitor (we very rarely do this because the cost is quite expensive). 7/Abandon the production of a product to make room for another more lucrative one (especially since products have a limited lifespan and are made obsolete when an adversary decides to produce the same one).
8/dismissal of an employee who has become too expensive...Even if this mechanism has a very classic side, I really appreciated the management of recurring costs in Silicon Valley! Your business and the salaries of your employees represent a recurring cost that you will have to pay each turn, after your 3 actions.
The original thing here is that your employees will cost more and more. Normal, their expertise will grow and they will demand salary increases. And these increases will happen quite quickly so that if you don't pay enough attention, your employees' salaries will quickly become unpayable. You will have to measure your commitments carefully, especially since at the start of the game, your employees will not cost you much.
This original cost management gives a great flavor to Silicon Valley because it requires good planning and a delicate balance. It is in your interest to hire a lot of employees to produce a lot of different polyominoes but you will have to be attentive to their increasing cost by carefully measuring your commitments. Because the higher your costs, the more risk capital actions will be necessary to be able to pay them (and the fewer actions you will be able to carry out in terms of VPs). Obviously, the less you commit, the fewer polyominoes you will produce and more actions will then be necessary to purchase them. You will have to find the right balance which will not be easy, especially during your first games.
But part by part, this delicate balance will not change and Silicon Valley risks lacking variability. This is the fault of the game. Even if the risk capital cards bring different bonuses, more asymmetry in bonuses to be gleaned here and there or even a system of permanent abilities could have brought a little more depth to the game.
The interaction between the players will bring a nice touch of variability and originality to the game. This race to invent products, the way of inventing them which will prevent others from copying them easily (or not), the race to copy products whose terms are set by the players themselves are all elements which will bring tension and charm to the game.
Finally, Silicon Valley is well embedded in its theme and we can already see ourselves creating our own company, hiring the right designers who will then be able to create sublime games that we will produce and store in our warehouses while waiting for them to be copied to create others, even more disruptive and original.
Good day and good game ;)
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