SummerSlam Challenge: McMulti

Well, I finally got a third game of McMulti in, and am finally prepared to discuss it.





The first thing about McMulti is that the rulebook translation sucks balls. The first time I played, I was wondering how such a simple game could possibly take so long, and it turns out that it's because there's ONE FUCKING WORD that was translated wrong. During the game, if you roll doubles, the economic situation (read: price of everything) changes. There's this little spiral track in the center of the board that represents the price of gasoline on the consumer market. Well, the rules say to adjust it up X spaces based on the number at the top of the Economic Situation card. Well, it should've said RED spaces, which was verified by a friend who speaks German. That one thing alone changed the game's duration by an hour for the second game.

But, let's back up and start talking about what it is.

McMulti is a bad ass little economic game whose theme is "petroleum". The idea is that you start with 200 million dollars in seed money and are trying to build an empire of 1 billion dollars for the win. The game is set up so that you initially spend money to buy oil wells, which are the "basic building block" of the game. Sadly, it's a crap shoot...you just place them on your 6x6 grid, taking up one space each, and hope that you strike oil eventually.

Once you have your little wells up, on each player's turn, you roll two colored dice and place them on your grid. If the intersection is on a well, that well can be immediately changed from a well to a pump, which is the mechanic to get you crude oil. Crude oil can be sold on the international or domestic market, which are 30-space grids with ever-increasing amounts of money you can buy or sell oil to or from. Now, here's the kicker: Oil pumps cost 10 million per pump, but increase in price by 10 million for each one on the board. For example, the first is 10 million, but the 10th is 100 million. So, getting lots of wells out there is a great idea, in theory, but the problem is that you really never need more than a couple of pumps to support your refineries.

Oil refineries, which are expensive as fuck-all generally, and can convert the crude to gasoline, which is the most valuable commodity. Finally, you can buy gas stations, which sell gasoline into the consumer market, which delivers the best price, generally. The one really neat thing is that the consumer price track is laid out so that the price of the first barrel is X, but each additional barrel is one million dollars cheaper, and so on. It really represents flooding the market well.

One oft-overlooked thing in the game is that you can actually make a ton of money buying and selling equipment...so in a recession (again, economic situation card) you can buy things cheap, and hope that a recovery, prosperity, or rapid growth situation card is on the way because you can double your money, almost, selling shit back to the bank. Now, you can only sell things when they're activated by that dice roll; if the die on either axis hits your space, you can sell it. In fact, everything but oil wells are set up to activate (ie, produce oil/gas or are allowed to sell the equipment) if you simply hit one die's axis.

So, now you know how to play. But there's more to it.

The first game, I had a strategy to forego the wells and pumps completely, and simply buy a gas station. You start out with 3 crude oil barrels and 3 gasoline barrels, so I was hoping to sell a couple barrels of gas at 27 million each, then use the proceeds to buy gas off the markets rather than producing them. This worked out great, and I almost won because I put up a bunch of gas stations and kept buying off the markets. Sadly, I lost because I was too overzealous and I left the markets open to the other players, who were producing their own crude and fuel and selling them onto the spaces I was opening up to them. It was a learning game, but the rules are really simple, so it was more like a "strategy testing game".

The second game I was going to put up a bunch of wells and a refinery. That worked out OK, and I was able to produce a shit-ton of gasoline, but I had to wait a great deal of turns to sell my fuel into the international/domestic markets for enough money to get some gas stations. I got lucky and a lot of doubles were rolled, so the fuel price was really high when I finally got the gas stations. I ended up winning, but it was close.

The last game was last night. I wanted to be more conservative, so I put up 10 wells in an "X" formation. I ended up hitting early and converting to pumps whilst my daughter was more conservative than I and reserved her money. She started the game by buying oil and gas cheap on the markets, which I thought would work to my advantage. We produced so much crude oil that we ran out of barrels, but we were both broke and with the Rapid Growth card up for most of the game, on and off, the refineries were expensive as fuck. I decided to sell off my pumps and use the proceeds to buy gas stations, but my daughter ended up loading up with gas stations. I thought I was on the glide and going to have a quick win, but to my shock and surprise, she hit the perfect axis and sold off 3 facilities for an egregious amount of money and killed me. Totally unexpected landslide.

In summary, I can say that I'm glad I spent $75 bucks on the game. I really love it. It is easily my favorite economic game, and I love that it has little plastic facilities and barrels. Chits would not have been as cool and fun to look at on the table (read: fuck Study in Emerald LOL). I love that there's enough randomness that it's sort of realistic, and the balance between the consumer, international, and domestic markets is insanely tight. All in all, it gives you a fun, memorable experience every time, and there's at least 5 identifiable paths to victory thanks to the depth of options available.

Totally recommend it to anyone who likes economic games, and I want to remind you that my 13 year old daughter, who is an "artsy" type and excellent student, but who DESPISES math really loves the game too. My wife even likes it, and the best way to describe her when it comes to international or national news, economics, or anything related is "aloof at best".


/Fin

Awesome post... could be article content IMHO.

I'm a little sad that there aren't more SS Challenge posts. Summer's damned near over.

I want to point out that I'n working 12 hour days, cleaning house, taking care of 2 kids, PUTTING A FUCKING ROOF ON AN OCTAGONAL 12' GAZEBO (no small feat) and STILL found time to both play games and report back to the SummerSlam Gods about this game.

Fuck sakes, boys and girls...SACK THE FUCK UP.

I wanna hear about your SummerSlam Xhallenges!!!

I'm a roof putting on fool....that's a shitload of ridge cap.

Space Ghost wrote: I'm a roof putting on fool....that's a shitload of ridge cap.

I took out the table saw and cut 80 6" ridge caps. It was relatively fast, and nailing them on was really not bad. It was making all the cuts on the shingles that sucked. It took me 16 hours or so just to get the cupola on. Now I still have to do the damned gazebo roof. I pre-cut the panels, but I still need to add support joists since the span is 52" top to bottom and 46" side to side. The cuts are immensely challenging.




I'm also not really sure what I want to do for the cap on the top. I was going to cut it flush and just have the roof meet up, but I think I want to do something more decorative. I'm thinking about getting 12" copper flashing, rolling it into a cone, then soldering it sealed, then nailing it to the center post or laying it on the center post and then nailing it to the roof deck.

I'm also really concerned about weight. I didn't want to buy cedar shake, and it never had a roof deck but instead had this sort of lath setup. So, I added 15/32 roof decking (pressure treated), then architectural shingles (heavy as fuck-all). I'm going to be incredibly pissed off if the thing collapses when the ice and snow start. That doesn't even count the soffits the wife wants to hide the nails.

I was considering building a permanent table in the center and then run a beam from the table deck to the cupola cap to support it, but I'm still on the fence. It has some great storm supports so it might be fine.

The end game is to screen it completely...we're converting our covered deck area into a workout room, and so we're not going to have a "smoking lounge". That's what this was all about.

That is looking good, Pete. I think the copper flashing as a cone would look really sharp.

I'm usually overly conservative, so I would put in the center support --- but, I am sure you know some contractor buddies that are familiar with all of the codes. Maybe you could have one look at it to determine if you have too much sheer force or if it is ok.

We had a guy come out who is going to replace two 30' 4 x 4 poles and he spotted some shoddy work that the deck builder had done. Then he looked to the left and saw the shitshow that is the neighbors hot tub on his deck and highly recommended that we think about putting a fence between our yards so our kids never can get under his deck because he thinks that the collapse of the deck is imminent.

Thanks, trust me...I'm worried about the footers as well as the structure itself. It's a kit-style gazebo with 4x4s as supports, but they're only tied to 4 piers on the bottom. I'm probably going to put a couple of piers underneath because I'm a tad bit worried about the whole thing sinking.

Is your move still on the horizon?

Nah, it looks like we can MAYBE barely get 140 for it, and I paid 138 for it then dumped in 45 grand. The world can eat a dick.