The Tao of Gaming

My GOF highlight this year was winning the most competitive game of FFF I'd ever played. 4 players to start, and after one went out mid-game, the remaining 3 played for over an hour with trips around and around the board where just enough properties were hit to keep everyone in the game, but no one quite got enough to win. I think everyone had at least 3 times where if an opponent rolled the right number, they'd have taken it. Eventually the game length gave me the win as I'd started Ice Cream and had the entire east coast, with all 26 franchises on the board for the last quarter of the game.

I've played most of my FFF games two-player, since my nephew and I played it like that a LOT. The one concern I had with it in that format is it seemed that you almost had to make your first business one of the big coverage companies (burgers or chicken, if memory serves) to stay competitive. Maybe that was just our groupthink, but it sure seemed that way to us.

I know, but we usually focused on building up our first company as much as we could before diversifying into a second. At the very least, we wanted to get all of the markets onto the board first, to maximize the number of spaces where we could get a big payoff (once they were all linked). Again, I'm not saying it was the best strategy (although it seemed so at the time), just that we played it that way. Tom could probably prove to me the error of our ways with a few pithy comments.