During my lunch break, myself and anywhere from two to six others get together and play games.  John (skipsizemore) has more games in his office than carpet fibers, so we always have a large number to choose from.  Today was Acquire, which we’ve played several times before.  It’s not the new version of Acquire with the fancy plastic building pieces, I’m talking about the original 1962 3M version in the blue box…

If there’s one thing Acquire has been doing for the past 48 years, it’s been allowing people to grief the living crap out of each other.  If you’ve played the game you know what I’m talking about.  If you haven’t, let me preface a quick description by saying that I’ve definitely played worse griefing games, but none of them do it with the old-school business swagger of Acquire.  It’s almost as if the game wasn’t designed to grief anyone, rather it was designed to bring out the worst griefer in all of us to do its bidding.  Basically there are a set number of corporations (in the original they were hotels) players build on what can only be described as a large bingo board.  As players lay down tiles and corporations merge, people win and lose large amounts of money they had invested in stock.  But fear not, one of the enveloped corporations may rise again elsewhere and under different leadership.

So yeah, to keep this article short and to the point… another player scowled at me during the game today.  I had just bought the majority stock in the company he had started and it merged before he could buy it back.  Translation, I just cut in front of him in the line where at the end they give you thousands of dollars because you’re the majority stock holder.  So he scowled, and then he said… “I hate you, Bryan.”  Ah yes, Acquire is a good game.

– Bryan
(thanks to BoardGameGeek and Angusbull for the photograph of the game)

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