A Deck-Builder of
Pure Greed
Number of Players
2-5
Recommended Ages
14+
Time to Play
2 hours
Mechanics Used
Deck-Building, Stock Manipulation, Aggressive Gameplay
Elevator Pitch
Completion Status
Get in, get as much as you can, and get it. That's the motto as players buy stock in failing companies, funnel it into dummy corporations, and loot those companies for as much as they can.
Incomplete. Needs image clearance, shorter game play, balanced.
Always be selling...
A deck-building game about greed and the economic collapse. So there are these Stock Cards and Dummy Corporations. Dummy Corporations are the tokens you store stock cards under. Stock cards, meanwhile, are the backbone of your deck. They serve the function of being your money, but they are also victory points but only if they are in your portfolio at the end of the game. Which dummy corporations they are compatible with is dependent on the icons at the top.
So next let's talk about action cards. You can attack an opponent and their portfolio in a myriad of ways. If they have a defense card, they can use it to, of course, defend. Likewise, other action cards allow you to essentially break the rules. Finally, there are the golden parachutes and company assets. To claim a company asset, a player must have the set number of stocks in that dummy corporation and then they discard 2 cards to claim that asset. The game is over when one pile is empty or someone has claimed the Employee Pensions from one of the dummy corporations.
I love deck-builders and I even love a deck-builder that typically gets a bad rap, Tanto Cuore. I like the concept of a game that actively encourages acquiring victory point cards but also giving people a way to pull the victory cards out of their deck. This of course is a largely ignored mechanic but if only someone built a more robust option of that game mechanic. Enter Too Big to Fail.
As manipulating the cards outside of your deck in a deck-builder was a fascinating concept to me, I naturally had to attach “stocks” to the theme and from there, the rest of the game fell in place as a hyper cynical look at the economic collapse. Naturally, I would have to through in a bunch of comedy and light jabs at the entire situation to make it enjoyable rather than depressing.
It made it's game test debut at Protospiel Milwaulkee, where the game was too damn long so changes were made. In fact, this seems to be the biggest hurdle to the game currently. Clocking in around 2 hours, there are deck-builders with similar play times but some have argued it needs to be shorter and I tend to agree. So at this point, Too Big to Fail is undergoing a constant test cycle with introducing new cards and ways to shorten it without taking the great parts about the game out of it.
The History of Too Big to Fail
