Board Game Review: Big Money

Entertainment, Travel, Sports, Food, or Science. You've got a flurry of fun, whimsical assets and stocks to purchase to build your engine. Watch out though, you might just roll the Biz News and all of your hard won earnings could evaporate. This game is great for the whole family. Kids love the dice and stacking up their dough, parents can laugh as the tension rises between mini tycoons.

Spider: I was surprised at how much I liked it. I felt like it had a fun vibe, 50's style art and font. It looks like an old fashioned style board game.

Playing with kids was fun. Seeing their development over the course of a few play throughs was cool. The rolling dice to earn money was fun, reminded me of poker or Yahtzee.

Buying stocks and not just assets was another cool element to earn money. Having the one time payout was cool and helped build cash quickly.

The game was almost all luck. You have to be ok with it. It was cool to have the Biz News negative effects because it could even the playing field with someone who jumps ahead from the beginning. However, it could also just wipe someone out from the beginning or if you repeatedly rolled that on the industry die it could seem lopsided. When that happened, the game just wasn't really fun.

There was a lot of clever stuff in the game. The ridiculously huge amounts of money were funny.

I liked how fast the turns were. Roll, resolve, buy. The kids wanted to play everyday. It was fun how the kids would cheer for each other when they had good rolls.

Cat: I loved this game. We played through this game 12 times in about a week. The kids loved this game and had so much building their little empires. My favorite part of the game was watching how each of the kids played differently. One bought as many stocks as possible. One went deep with buying one asset to reap the bonuses. One had a balanced portfolio to play the long game. The younger two ended up winning multiple times each. They would reflect on their strategies and then try different things to see how that affected their earnings in future rounds of the game. I really valued the autonomy of decision-making and how it empowered them to look at what they had in the bank and then make choices to fulfill their strategies.

I liked the components of the game for the most part. The dice were super chunky and I loved that. I liked the rounded edges and the font. The game reminded me of playing Yahtzee as a kid, so the nostalgia effect was strong. The art, the font were so fun. I like how it blended modern concepts like windmill farms, rotating restaurants, underwater restaurants, with candy factories, or private island resorts. The cartoon art was really cute and I found myself reading and looking at the cards in between my turns. The details were fun.

Squid (age 12): It was fun to watch everyone get destroyed by the Biz News cards. I liked how I could earn money from my rolls, earn money from the industries I owned, or even cash out stocks all in a single turn if I owned the right industry. I would have preferred regular, pointy cornered dice. The money could have been a little thicker to make it easier to hand out.

Owl (age 8): Rolling the dice was really fun. I liked that when you got more than one asset in a group you could get bonuses. I liked that you could get different amounts of money for the different dice rolls. I thought it was cool that I could earn money when other people rolled the industries I owned. That helped me get more money when it wasn't even my turn.

Dog (age 6): I liked the different ways to earn money from rolling dice. I liked the little straights and the big straights. I liked how five people could play the game. We have five people in our family and we could all play the game. I liked the giant money! The cup to roll the dice was fun to hold.

Pros:

money management for kids

whimsical appearance

ease for kids to quickly understand

great for a family of 5

quick rounds

Cons:

thin money, easy for the bills to stick together

random bad luck that could pile up

Spider: Three Spiders