Tech Race Kickstarter preview—Hyperloopin’ Louie

In the near future, Silicon Valley has continued to only succeed in driving demand for their ideas, not actually bringing them to fruition. This is where the players of Tech Race come in: as CEOs of startups, they’re attempting to take advantage of that gap. I’m not quite sure why the masses are demanding hyperloops and brain implants of all things, but dammit you’re gonna provide them!

Gameplay is straightforward once you get in the swing of it: each of the game’s 9 rounds starts with a hiring phase, where players use their unassigned employee tokens either assigning them as level 1 employees or spending them to level up employees. After everyone’s done hiring, you move onto the action phase, where you’ll use your employees. HR gets you more hires next turn and upgrades into office managers, which also drop offices into regions, letting you grab customers from that pool. Sales employees pull customers from the shared board onto your personal board, where your engineers can service them to get you money. Research scientists get resources and spend them to advance your tech, making you more money for appropriately colored customers. Finally, marketing drops customers onto a region and finance gives you straight money and vp, but much less efficiently than appropriately utilizing the other roles. After they’re done using all their employees, players have to play everyone, or lose those they can’t afford.

Finally, there’s a lobbying phase, a blind auction to choose one of 3 available effects that will be familiar to anyone that’s been in the hobby for a while. Throw in the randomly drawn achievements that players can work towards for a hefty chunk of points, and those hobby vets will see the shape of a streamlined, more approachable version of the Spotter megahit Food Chain Magnate. Their campaign launches on December 3rd, so be sure to check them out!

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