Racoon Tycoon: Fat Cat Expansion
Hey Everyone! Today I wanted to give you a quick preview of the new Racoon Tycoon Fat Cat expansion! So first off, this is a fantastic gateway game that helps introduce new gamers into the deep breadth of tabletop games. It has quality gameplay, gorgeous artwork, and durable components. This new expansion allows you to play with up to 6 players, up from five so you can squeeze in that last family member or friend into your game! It has a complexity rating of just 2.17 out of 5 on BGG which means it should be fairly easy for your friends to understand.
The game takes place in Astoria which is a land busling with productivity and growth with new towns, factories and railroads! As the city grows the tycoons are producing commodities like wheat to feed the growing town, wood and iron the build them, coal to fuel the trains and factories and manufactured goods and luxuries to fill the insatiable demand of the local critters. You’ll need to do your best to corner the market on the most valuable commodities to make your fortune!
The way the game works is like this, on their turn they can take a number of actions. There are 5 total available actions. Production, Sell a commodity, railroad auction, purchase a building, and purchase a town.
Production
During production players play one of their price and production cards from their hand. Then they take 3 goods shown in the production area of the card here, and they increase the value of the goods in the commodity area here. There are some cards that will make the action more powerful and it’s important to know that each player may only have up to 10 commodity tokens at any one time.
Sell a Commodity
Any quantity of a single type of commodity owned by the player may be sold from just one good up to all of the goods they own. The tokens are returned to the supply and the player is paid the current value shown on the market for each commodity sold and then the price of that good drops the number of units sold. So if they sold 4 coal tokens for $____ each they would get $___ and the overall value of that good will drop in value to $___ per good.
Start a Railroad Auction
Take a railroad card from the two on the offer and begin an auction for that card. The minimum bid for the card is shown on it. Each player bids or passes the turn clockwise and the highest bid wins the card and pays its cost. If they player who started the auction doesn’t win then they may perform any action including another auction. If they did then their turn ends.
Purchase a Building The player selects one of the four building tiles on offer and payts its cost shown. They gain its benefits for the rest of the game and when it’s taken its replaced by a new building so there are always 4 available.
Purchase a town
Purchase the available town card by paying the number of commodities displayed on the card. These are used for payment and put back into the supply. The card is placed in front of the player who purchased it and a new card from the deck is turned up so that one is always available for purchase.
So what’s new in the Fat Cat Expansion!? Well there are four new cards and four new town cards to switch up the game play plus there are 14 new building tiles that will assist you in building an engine to earn money and increase production, resulting in gaining more points.
There are new locomotive, housing, animal and tycoon meeple! These are worth VP and can be purchased and added to the players board to earn points shown in the left-most slot that is filled which brings me to the next thing the expansion adds which is a slotter player board! These allow players to store their building tiles, tokens and meeples in their board.
There is also a giant fat cat starting player marker which will be included in this expansion. This means if you have the base and the expansion you’ll have a Racoon and a kitty on hand. Maybe it’s time to start an adorable meeple colony!
The best and add-on to the expansion is the Emma’s Art railroad and town cards. The designers daughter created the artwork for the prototype when she was 12 years old and they’ll be added into this game featuring the original artwork from Emma.
The expansion is on Kickstarter right now so make sure you check it out and tell us in the comments below if you’re more of a cat or a raccoon! I’m really torn but I think I’m more of a trash panda than a fancy cat! Thanks for watching and don’t forget to check out our patreon. Be Bold, Play Games, Be You, Happy Gaming!