Operation: Game Night
Travis Smith, Jared Erickson, and Clay Gable get together to discuss the latest and greatest in board games in this weekly podcast. What's hot, what's hitting the table, featured discussions about board games and the board gaming culture, and the primary mission objective- to play more board games!
Operation: Game Night
Debrief: Trash Pandas & Top Hats- Raccoon Tycoon
Dive into the charming yet strategically rich world of Raccoon Tycoon, a market manipulation and auction game that offers surprising depth beneath its Victorian-era animal artwork. The OGN crew explores this hidden gem from Forbidden Games that masterfully blends economic mechanics with approachable gameplay.
Ever wonder what happens when you combine adorable anthropomorphic animals with cutthroat economic strategy? Raccoon Tycoon answers this question with its elegant price and production card system that creates genuine moments of excitement as markets rise and fall. The hosts break down how players must carefully time their resource sales, weighing immediate profits against long-term strategy while constantly monitoring what opponents might be planning.
What makes this game truly special is its accessibility. Despite featuring market manipulation, auctions, and engine building, Raccoon Tycoon remains remarkably approachable - the hosts successfully taught and played two complete games with non-gamers in under two hours. The railroad auction system creates natural player interaction as bidders drive up prices, while building purchases provide permanent bonuses that shape your economic strategy. With multiple paths to victory through town cards or railroad sets, every decision feels meaningful without overwhelming players with complexity.
Whether you're a seasoned economic game enthusiast or someone looking to introduce friends to market manipulation mechanics, Raccoon Tycoon delivers a deeply satisfying experience that plays in under an hour. Check it out if you enjoy games with simple rules but meaningful decisions - you might be surprised how quickly you become invested in cornering the luxury goods market as a top-hatted raccoon!
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the space shuttle oh yeah, we are back we are back.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to ogn in the house. My name is travis smith and I'm back in the hot seat and I'm here with jared. Jared's here as well. Joined as always. Co-host clayton gable clay. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:I'm doing great travis. I'm excited to learn all about raccoon tycoon today with you that's right.
Speaker 1:Oh my god. This is our first of our new format. Today we are just doing the debrief and today we're talking raccoon tycoon game published in 2018 by forbidden games. Designer is glenn drover and the artist is Jacoby O'Connor and Annie Steg. It is a game about becoming a tycoon. What type of tycoon? Well, a raccoon tycoon.
Speaker 1:It's a game where you are trying to outwit and outwager your opponents to earn the most victory points at the end by becoming a mogul, and you do so by trading resources and auctioning and doing all sorts of other mechanisms, but we'll get into that later. Uh, basically, the end goal is to finish the game once one of the deck of cards runs out. You need to have the most amount of victory points, um, and you earn those victory points by buying, uh, railroads, sets of railroads in an auction or, uh, by buying town pieces or town cards that are worth victory points at the end. So, to set up the game, you lay out board, you shuffle up all the cards Railroad goes down, face down, with two face up. The town cards go next to the railroads face down, with one, face up. Then you have some starting buildings that will earn you bonuses if you buy them. Everybody gets a couple of, I don't know, astoria bucks this is supposed to take place in the land of Astoria, some fictional place. And then you get three price and production cards and you randomly select a starting player and, as you go around, each subsequent player gets additional resources to start the game with, gets additional resources to start the game with, and the resources are wheat, wood, iron, coal goods and luxury goods Ooh, and they are designated up top with these kind of weird snake-like patterns. And one of those tiles, one of those little assets, goes on the bottom rung of that ladder to dictate the price of those tiles. One of those little assets goes on the bottom rung of that ladder to dictate the price of those goods. And so on your turn, you are playing your price and production cards, which are split in two, to gain resources and to raise the price of other resources. And to raise the price of other resources, you are buying town cards with money, or you're initiating an auction for the railroads, and what you're trying to do is you're trying to collect the sets of railroads town cards, or there's buildings that you can buy, and the buildings will earn you bonuses and the ability to store more resources. When you first start the game you're capped at 10 resources. So you kind of have to make some tough choices about what resources you want and how you can slowly build that engine so you can build your town faster. So your turn is pretty simple.
Speaker 1:Let's see if we can find a card picture that has the price and production cards. So the price and production cards. The price and production cards are split in two. On the bottom half you have production. On the bottom half you have production. On the top half you have price. So you can pick up to three of the items that are on the production side to take into your inventory. Uh, if it is shown multiple times, you can take multiple resources. Um, and so you gather those resources, you, they add them to your pool and then the price of the items up at the top half of the card will go up, and you're constantly getting and producing these resources and then selling them back to the bank for more money. But then you can spend to upgrade your storage, to upgrade your town and to buy sets of railroads, and when one of the railroads or the town runs out, games over once you complete the cycle of players and whoever has the most amount of victory points wins. Before we get any deeper, what questions you have yeah, okay.
Speaker 3:so when I watched the video in preparation for this, I saw this like price and production card and I thought it was so cool how you can manipulate the price of the goods and then once you go and sell those goods now, the price drops. So that kind of stock market-y pricing and selling was awesome. I mean, just from watching the how to Play video.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I should open up front with this. At its core, this is a market manipulation game where you're trying to hold off long enough until it's your turn to sell off those goods at the highest price you can. But you don't want to wait too long, because if somebody else is gaining a bunch of money and they're going to beat you to auction for a set that you need for the railroads, or they are buying one of the town cars that you need, um, then you might have waited too long and then you get bought out and the price goes down.
Speaker 1:Some of these benefits that you get from the buildings are phenomenal. They like will raise the price up to three notches before you sell. Oh, um, so like, when we played this, one of the players had a I think it was the luxury goods before they sold luxury goods. It knocked the price up three notches and then she sold and it went down and it was like, oh yeah, if you were selling a hefty amount of luxury goods, you could potentially, like just break in so much money.
Speaker 1:I don't know if anybody ever touched a hundred dollar bill in this game. They have up to hundreds, um, but we had enough to at least make the auctions competitive and to buy these town cards at their highest price. So that I guess that's the difference is that the railroads that are earned by these auctions that you go through you buy with the money that you earn from selling resources. The town cards you buy with the resources themselves, and so you have to kind of weigh your options. I could buy this town card for super cheap, because this good that I'm trading for it is not worth a lot right now, and so timing those like riding those markets between, like selling off goods for a lot of money to potentially buy railroads versus buying town pieces at lower costs is all part of the calculus that goes in while you're playing you kind of have to play what's available in the market at the time to maximize what like what your returns are going to be right, yeah definitely.
Speaker 2:There's only the like. Only four buildings are shown at a time, is that right?
Speaker 1:correct. So, yeah, let's talk about the buildings for a sec. The buildings are these tiles. There's four of them available at any given time.
Speaker 1:When the game starts, you'll see these basic buildings at the bottom. They're indicated by a, b at the top and they largely align with the resources that are available in the game. You pick four at random and then you kind of sprinkle them out there, so you're not always going to get bonuses for all of the resources, but you might have a wheat, an iron and then, uh, I don't know a luxury or something out there. And what those do is, every time, like let's say, I buy the wheat, every time I that's $4. $4, yeah, that's that coin symbol at the bottom there of the buildings Every time I buy a wheat I get an additional wheat. If I have a production card that has two wheat symbols on it and I say I want two wheats, I get two additional wheats. So you can like double them up. Yeah, the cool thing about some of these buildings at least the basic ones you can pay the cost of the back side of the card, so there's like a level one, level two. You can upgrade those and potentially get two additional wheats per and so that I I don't know if we ever upgraded those, which is kind of seemed like a missed opportunity. But some of those buildings are really beneficial, others not so much, and those ones kind of just sit out there. But buying buildings allows you to store more of your goods as you go along, so you could potentially be sitting on a huge stockpile of a certain type of good waiting for that price to go up. Yeah, this game is awesome. I, you know, I this game was always really intimidating to me and I was interested in trying it, and I know it's been re-implemented in what lizard wizard, um. But I, I find the market manipulation versus like the pressure of buying now versus you, versus collecting those sets or preventing your opponents from collecting sets of railroads made for this really interesting player interaction where you're trying to get there before them but you want to be patient and time those markets correctly.
Speaker 1:The auctions are pretty simple. Somebody says I'm going to buy Top, buy top dog railroad for six and that's the minimum. Then it goes around and anybody that drops out just gets skipped over. You go up and up and up. There's no limit to how high you can go until somebody, everybody else, is backed out. They pay that cost, they get the card and then, based on the number of matching railroad types that they have, uh, the more points they earn in the end game. So, like you see two top dogs if you're, you know, an audio listener on the screen we have two top dog railroads showing, and if I had both of those and those are the only railroads I had I would get nine victory points versus the four for having only one, and so the more you have, the more points you earn. You get all four of them. You get 23 victory points, which is significant. So, yeah, beating people to the railroad auctions is also super important.
Speaker 2:But then I would probably want to bid you higher or like okay, travis, he's hounding up all the top dogs, I'm going to make him pay for it. So that gives me like no thanks vibes, where sometimes you just kind of push people to uh, they got to spend a little bit more, or, you know, milking people for more money. That that's kind of cool, a good mechanism in the bedding aspect of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Like that Definitely love the auctions. Super simple, they go really fast. Um, and yeah, you can try and outspend people or, like you know I they're going in now I can potentially have them like, force them to spend more than they would have normally because I know that they really want it. Um, that's an interesting aspect of it. What's any questions? Clayton?
Speaker 3:Yeah, if, if, if. Clayton yeah, if, if I may, and I don't lose my connection here uh, how many people did you play?
Speaker 1:with. You might have said I was going in and out. Yeah, we played with four. It plays two to five and it was recommended at four on board game geek. Um, it says it plays like 60 to 120 minutes.
Speaker 1:If you're spending two hours on this game, something's gone wrong or somebody's sitting there like hemming and hawing about what to do. We did a teach and a play for brand new players and we played it in under an hour and we played it back to back. So we played it twice back to back.
Speaker 1:I think people were kind of confused about the initial strategy, or they went in with like preconceived notions about what their strategy should be and then we played the game and they didn't get the results that they thought that they were going to get. And then we ran it back and people tried new strategies and it kind of shook out a little differently than we were expecting. So I I, if you ask me what the correct strategy is or the most efficient, I could not tell you. It's one of those games where, like, it probably depends on what everybody else is doing that you'll have to adjust your strategy on the fly, which I love. But yeah, I mean it was simple enough to get four brand new players to play it back to back twice in two hours.
Speaker 3:So uh, really yeah it was kind of giving me um raw vibes the fact that you can decide to start an auction.
Speaker 1:I like that yeah, and and it's. It's kind of cool because, like they could, you could have railroads sitting out there the whole game and nobody ever bids until somebody kicks that off. And all of a sudden it's like, oh, we're doing railroad bidding now. Oh, people like are focused on what cards are available and what other people have in front of them. I found that, like the first two, three turns, people didn't really touch the railroads. They're all trying to like manipulate markets. And then somebody will like come up with a surplus of wheat or wood or whatever and they'll buy a town card and those town cards increase in point value as you get deeper into the stack and, like you know, it's like, oh, somebody's on the board now, somebody's got victory points, and then you know, you go around a couple more times, people are manipulating markets and getting more money and all of a sudden, like one of the auctions kick off and it's like everybody's, everybody's hyper aware of what railroads are on the board and who has what.
Speaker 1:And uh, that's a really cool like player interaction type thing. Uh, let's talk about theme here for a minute. Uh, uh, the theme is like barely pasted onto this thing. Like I, I get it, you're in astoria and raccoon and tycoon rhyme, but the theme is, like it, non-existent. Right, the art is super cute. They have these like victorian area animals that are painted on the railroads. Your starting player marker is a little cute raccoon holding a lantern.
Speaker 2:Uh, anthropomorphic is your, that's your sweet spot other than other than that.
Speaker 1:Like you could make this any other tycoon type game. You could just call this like market manipulator and railroad bitter. Get the game and it would be the exact same, like the raccoons and the uh, animals have really nothing to do with it and yeah, but it makes it cute, right? I mean it does make it cutesy. It's cutesy and the art is very good, but yeah, the theme is like the mechanics are the ones that really shine here.
Speaker 3:The theme is ticker, to leave it but I mean the the animal part of the theme. But the theme of, I guess, like the gameplay, like you feel like you're really trying to get money and purchase railroads and you know, become this tycoon of industry, you're saying the raccoon piece of it doesn't matter, the animal, yeah.
Speaker 2:You could put this in outer space and it would still be the same game. Yeah, yeah, you could. You put it underwater, you could make them fish and uh, they'd still be the same. That's right, just making an aquarium.
Speaker 3:Yeah, harpoon tycoon. Um, where are we going here?
Speaker 2:wait, what did you call it? Harpoon?
Speaker 1:okay, yeah, yeah, yeah oh, jared so, yeah, I I know that this has an expansion and I'm not entirely sure what that looks like. I don't know what mechanics it adds clay. Did you come across anything when you were doing your research?
Speaker 3:no, I, I just watched the one how to play video and read some comments on board game geek and yeah, it's pretty well rated. I mean, I I had I don't know why I just I see this, it's a target sometimes too. And uh, I see it and I just I'm like I don't know what that is. But after watching the video and hearing you talk about it, this seems like a great, almost gateway type game to have around, because people understand buying and selling goods right and and after that you just gotta, you know, teach them a basic auction and you're like you're off to the races yeah, and we played with people that do not play board games hardly at all, hardly at all and they picked it up super quick.
Speaker 1:We gave gave them a brief rundown of the rules. The way that I learned this my brother sat there and literally read me the rulebook verbatim and while I have played a fair amount of board games and understand mechanics, he got halfway through the rulebooks and I was like, all right, I get it, we can do this. And then we just verbally explained how it works to the other two and we were off the races. That's cool, yeah, super, super easy. I was always kind of intimidated by, I don't know, maybe the artwork or something. You see it on the shelf. It says Raccoon Tycoon, it says auction and manipulation and stuff, and I guess in my brain this was like a train 4X game. It's not like that at all. It's a simple market manipulation and auction game and that's it. Yeah, I really enjoyed this one. It plays quickly, it's a good intro game, it's a good onboarding game and I had a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:This picture we have up right now is from Tabletopia. What the heck is that? This is online board gaming, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's the same as Tabletop Simulator. Tabletop Simulator Similar.
Speaker 2:Really so we could play when I finally pull Chox from Alabama and I leave you here to sweat alone, that's right. From Alabama and I leave you here to sweat alone, that's right and I haul up north to connect with Clay.
Speaker 1:Yes, we could potentially play this on stream.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 3:Stream. Wow, I'll stream you later. I think we're kind of coming in here at a nice mark for what we want these debriefs to be about. The 20-minute mark, yeah, is there any final thoughts you had on raccoon tycoon are you gonna buy this for yourself? Is it yours?
Speaker 1:so it is not mine. Uh, the reason that I ended up playing it was because we're, you know, in my brother's house. My brother had two copies of it sitting up on a shelf, unopened, collecting dust. And I said, taylor, raccoon, tycoon, and he's like, if you want a copy of that, it's yours. Oh, I picked this thing off the shelf and I like blew dust off it, yeah, and he was like I've always wanted to play. You know, it kind of ended up as like this weird situation where he bought it for his significant other, she bought it for him and then they never played either copy. So, yeah, this is a great game that flew under the radar for far too long and I definitely want to get this played again. I'm curious to check out what the expansion adds and how it was improved in its re-implementation in Lizard Wizard. So I'll do a little more research before I pull the trigger, but I definitely have a copy standing by if I want it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's awesome. It's definitely gone to the middle top of my games to buy list after this the middle top my games to buy list after this the middle top, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So if you're into market manipulation and auction games, this is one to own. So Raccoon Tycoon.
Speaker 3:Okay, I like that Debriefed Outro Music.
