Play as mighty raccoons

In 🦝 Raccoon Tycoon you are a business tycoon in the growing land of Astoria. You are here to try your luck and make a fortune by investing in railroad companies, constructing buildings and towns, and doing some lucrative trades on the ever-changing commodity market.

The game’s structure is pretty simple. On your turn you choose to do one of 5 things:

🔨 Produce resources by playing a commodity card: pick 3 of the resources shown on the lower part, then increase the market price for the resources shown of the upper part of the card.
💰 Sell commodities: sell as many as you want from a single resource type and get the market price for them.Then decrease the market price by the amount sold.
🚂 Start an auction for a railroad card: you go around and bid in clockwise order until no one wants to offer more. The winner gets the card, which is a big victory point source with a set-collection element.
(The 2p auction is a bit more tough: if you start an auction you have to say a price, then your opponent either gives more or refuses. You can not increase your bid anymore.)
🏘️ Buy a town card for the specific resources it needs
🏗️ Build a building by paying money for it. These could improve your resource production, give an ongoing ability or break some rule of the game for you.

You go around in turn order doing one action at time, up until either the railroad cards or the town cards run out, then you add up your points to see who has won.

💬 It’s hard for me to judge this game because we don’t really have such economic games, with player-influenced markets and auctions. While we still enjoyed playing, in my opinion 2 is not the ideal player count here. The changing prices of commodities on the market worked well even with 2, but the auctions are hard to gauge. We’ll definitely try this with more players. I also found buildings somewhat weak yet expensive, at least when compared to the amount of points you can get out of railroad cards.

My favorite feature of the game are definitely the antropomorphic animals dressed in old-timey clothes. They all look splendid. ☕😄