Raccoon Tycoon Review

ALERT! This game has railroads! ALERT #2! This is NOT a train game! That makes ME feel lots better. Right now in my life train games and war games scare me. I don’t have the time, and frankly I do not think I am quite smart enough for either. But then this game comes along and it looks intimidating at first. Like games I am not smart enough to play, and that’s a huge compliment. Not because I think I am smart, but because this game seems like it would be way more complex than it actually is.

Technically, the players are these cute little Victorian-era anthropomorphized animals trying to become the wealthiest of all Astorians (the city is called Astoria). This is measured by Victory Points. You gain VPs in several ways and the actions you take on your turn are limited.

What are these actions you can take on your turn? You may take one action on your turn: play a card from your hand to receive commodities (in really great meeples) and increase the price of commodities to be sold, sell commodities from your supply and decrease the price of the commodities by the number sold, purchase a town card using commodities, purchase a building using money earned, or begin an auction of a railroad using money. Each of these actions ultimately affects your opponents as they either adjust the market price of commodities, removes certain coveted assets from the offer, or otherwise depletes their resources. Also, there are mission cards in the box that are just not referenced in the rulebook, but two are to be dealt to the players and one chosen as a hidden goal for endgame scoring.

I will be honest. I would not normally be attracted to this style of game, and I may not have ever purchased it in the wild based on the box. I have zero games like it in my collection, and have not really played many that are similar. BUT, I absolutely love this game. Once you get the hang of the different actions you can really start planning ahead and creating your strategy based on what your opponents are doing and how the commodity market is shaping up. You can block opponents from monopolizing similar types of railroads, preventing them from scoring bulk points. You can just concentrate on liquidating assets for maximum return. All of this can be done by completing just one action on your turn, and it keeps you interested in what your opponents are doing as well. That is a mark of a great game. This isn’t just multiplayer solitaire at all.

Components. The box has really really great artwork on it. In fact, the whole game LOOKS incredible. I have seen some remarks that the artwork on the building tiles is in a different style from the rest of the game and it detracts from their enjoyment and immersion. I disagree. When we played the first time I asked if my opponent noticed the difference in art style and if it detracted from the enjoyment of the game. Nope. The game board is good quality and laid out well. The commodities tokens are really great. I do wish, however, that the meeple shape matched that of the icon shown throughout the game. This is apparent in coal and iron, specifically. The others are fine and they match well enough, but there is a missed opportunity. The town and railroad cards are of good quality, and the building tiles are very thick and chunky – and ultimately not necessary to be so since you don’t really handle them much, but it’s always nice to have deluxe-feeling components. The paper money is of good quality – for paper money, that is. The best component of the game – the 1st player marker. I didn’t get it in the shot below because it just woodent (I did that on purpose) fit! It is a HUGE brown raccoon meeple and it’s marvelous. Know what else I really appreciate? THERE IS NO INSERT (at least there wasn’t in my game). Nothing to throw away as soon as you open the box because undoubtedly once you punch everything and try to put it in the useless insert there is no way so you just throw it away anyway and are left feeling like maybe they could have saved some time and money not worrying about an insert that is actually pointless and detrimental to setup and teardown (I’m looking at you, pointless Fantasy Flight box-space-eater inserts).

I don’t know if you can tell from my verbosity in this review, but I adore this game. It is sleek, it is well-produced, and ultimately it is incredibly fun to play. We at Purple Phoenix Games give this one a VERY enthusiastic 14 / 18.