Food Chain Magnate: The Ketchup Mechanism & Other Ideas

Food Chain Magnate already has quite a story behind it: from a secret passion for a handful of devotees, Splotter suddenly became the group’s hipster trap. Plenty of people fell for it — or at least said they did, because it is exactly the kind of brutal game that beats you up in the playground and takes your favourite toy as well. Then the expansion arrived, the money was collected, and then... silence. I no longer see it played or discussed very often, nor does Ketchup inspire the endless conversation it theoretically deserves. Even so, after my latest game, I would not rush to sell it, however far its price has climbed.

Ketchup’s main problem is also its central promise: eleven small and large modules, with only a few loose guidelines on how to combine them. Throw everything in together and you risk producing the familiar soup of celery, carrot, dill, tomato, and cucumber. We tried the “high society” set, with alternate achievements, sushi, coffee, and the central tile with parks. The alternate goals are the major upheaval: the familiar strategies and card balance you knew from the base game stop being givens. Some openings initially look like products of the “we didn’t playtest this at all” school, but as the game goes on, you can see that characteristic gleam in the designers’ eyes.

Alternate, of course, does not mean easier or friendlier. It means more complex openings and, in some cases, outright cuts at the table to stop the game from tilting before it has properly begun — such as not allowing someone to take both first marketer and first lemonade sold. The interaction remains FCM’s familiar, merciless economic conflict, except that the new tools shift priorities and make mistakes costly in different ways. In our game, sushi wrecked everything else that had clicked: we let one player build a monopoly, and the sushi plus luxury manager combination made them unstoppable, to the point of putting up double the score of the player with the CFO.

I do not think the sushi mechanism is bad; perhaps it simply ought to be used only with five or six players, so that too many cooks cannot accumulate under one player. Overall, we liked the changes, and the expansion shows how many more miles Food Chain Magnate has left for anyone interested in exploring it. It does demand care when assembling modules, though, because the risk of a spectacular but disappointing imbalance is real. Still, I will be returning to the restaurant war soon.