Food Chain Magnate
Food Chain Magnate Rulebook
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Object
Have the most cash when the game ends. You earn money by selling food and drinks to the city's houses, and you spend it on salaries and expansion. The game ends when the bank breaks for the second time; the richest chain wins.
Key Concepts
- Employee cards depict staff, each with an ability. Cards with an entry icon can be hired; cards with a salary icon must be paid; cards with training options can be trained up their career path; and top-position cards (one per player) are limited. Cards are placed into a company structure—a pyramid under the CEO.
- Company structure: the CEO sits on top with 3 slots. Cards reporting to the CEO can be staff or managers; each manager (black card) has 2–10 slots for normal staff only (managers can't report to managers). Only cards "at work" this turn count.
- Milestones: one-time achievements (e.g. first to market a burger, first to lower prices) that grant powerful permanent bonuses to whoever claims them first.
- Range is counted by crossing onto new map tiles along roads (or ignoring roads, for zeppelins), starting from a restaurant entrance.
- Restaurants are 2×2 tiles with a marked entrance; each player has three.
- Food and drinks are wooden pieces: on houses they show demand, on campaigns they show what's advertised and for how long, and in your hands they're stock.
Setup (overview)
Lay out employee and milestone cards (removing some employee types by player count). Build a map of randomly drawn, randomly rotated tiles (size by player count). Each player takes a CEO card, 3 restaurants, and 3 bank reserve cards. Fill the bank with $50 × number of players (players start with no money). Randomly set turn order; then, from last to first, each player places one starting restaurant (entrance on a road, not sharing a tile-entrance with another restaurant). Finally, each player secretly chooses one bank reserve card—collectively these determine how much money is added when the bank first breaks, so nobody knows exactly how long the game will last.
A Turn (Seven Phases)
Phase 1: Restructuring
Simultaneously, each player secretly chooses which employees to bring at work this turn (the rest go "on the beach"—unusable but still trainable and still owed salary). Reveal all chosen cards at once and build them into your company structure pyramid under the CEO. Cards that don't fit go to the beach; if you over-committed, you play with only the CEO. (In turn one, only the always-at-work CEO is played.)
Phase 2: Order of Business
Choose positions on the turn order track. The player with the most open slots (unfilled CEO/manager slots) chooses first, and so on. Fewer open slots generally means later in order—but there are only as many spots as players.
Phase 3: Working 9:00–5:00
In turn order, each player performs one action per card at work (some actions are mandatory). Actions resolve in a fixed order regardless of pyramid position:
- Recruit: the CEO always gives one free hire; recruiting cards add more. Hire only entry-position cards to your beach (or hire-and-immediately-train). Unused recruiting-manager/HR-director actions become salary discounts later.
- Train: each training action advances one beach employee one step along its career path (marketeers, kitchen staff, and buyers have their own upgrade tracks; others train from managers). Coaches and gurus can train the same card multiple steps.
- Initiate marketing campaigns: each marketeer places a campaign—billboard, mailbox, airplane, or radio—of a certain range and duration, then chooses what it advertises (marking it with wooden pieces equal to its duration). The marketeer becomes busy (set aside with a "busy" chip) until the campaign ends and takes up no slot while busy.
- Get food & drinks: kitchen staff produce burgers/pizzas; buyers (errand boy, cart operator, truck driver, zeppelin pilot) collect drinks by tracing routes past drink sources on the map. Stock is shared across all your restaurants.
- Place or move restaurants: local managers place a new "Coming Soon" restaurant within range 3 (opens end of turn); regional managers place or move a restaurant anywhere immediately. Both grant drive-ins while active.
- Place houses and gardens: a new business developer adds a house (must touch a road) or a garden (doubling a house's purchases).
Phase 4: Dinnertime
Houses eat in ascending printed-number order. A house with demand tokens looks for a chain, connected by road, that can supply its entire order (food and drinks). If several chains qualify, the inhabitants pick the one with the lowest unit price + distance (standard unit price is $10, adjusted by pricing/discount/luxury managers and milestones; distance is road steps). Ties break by most waitresses, then earlier turn order. The chosen chain serves the goods and is paid unit price plus milestone bonuses per item; a garden doubles the unit-price portion. Afterward, waitresses earn $3 (or $5 with the milestone) each, and a CFO grants +50% on all cash earned this turn. If the bank can't pay everyone, it breaks.
Phase 5: Payday
Fire anyone you wish (returning cards to stock), then pay $5 salary for each remaining card (in structure or on the beach) that shows a salary icon. Milestones, recruiting discounts, and abilities can reduce salaries (minimum $0). Busy marketeers with salaries must still be paid, or be fired.
Phase 6: Marketing Campaigns
Campaigns run in ascending number order, placing demand tokens of the advertised type on reached houses (max 3 per house, or 5 with a garden): billboards hit adjacent houses; mailboxes fill the road-enclosed block; airplanes cover their rows/columns; radios hit the surrounding tiles. Remove one advertising token per campaign afterward; when a campaign is spent, free its marketeer (unless it's an "eternal" campaign from the first-billboard milestone).
Phase 7: Clean Up
Discard leftover food/drinks (unless you have the relevant milestone), take all cards back to hand, flip "Coming Soon" restaurants to "Welcome," and remove any milestone types claimed this turn from the game.
Breaking the Bank and Ending the Game
- First break: reveal the players' chosen reserve cards, add their summed money to the bank, and set the new CEO slot count based on the reserve cards' most common slot number.
- Second break: the game ends at the close of that Phase 4. Finish paying everyone (on paper if the bank is empty; no salaries are paid this turn). The player with the most cash wins; ties break in favor of the earlier player in turn order.