Players: 2-6
Time: 1 hour
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)

The Components

Take Stock comes with 100 cards, 30 tokens, and 1 rulebook.

Cards: The cards are all printed full color on sturdy, linen-textured cards. They feature attractive artwork by Oliver Castaneda.

60 of the cards are "share" cards, a 1-12 in each of 5 different stocks. Besides its value, each card is also worth a number of shares, from 0-3. This is helpfully noted on the bottom of the card, so that you can flip the card upside down when you're using it as a share. (A good design.)

The other 40 cards are events. Each shows artwork meant to depict 1 of 12 different market events. Unfortunately these icons are not all intuitive. In both games I played multiple players had to go to the rulebook multiple times to try and figure out what a card did. I think this will be a constant issue for any new player who plays the game. A couple of the cards (Stock Freeze, Audit, Stock Split) are sufficiently complex, that even if you remember what the icon means, you might have to go to the rulebook for a better explanation. It's entirely unfortunate that these icons weren't made more intuitive, or alternatively that words weren't put on these cards.

Stock Options: 30 cardboard chits printed on linen-textured cardstock. Two of my options fell apart during my first game. I don't know if this is a more general problem, or I just got a bum sheet. I've never seen counters do that before, so I'd hope the latter.

The chits are large and say "Stock Option" on them, but aren't particularly evocative.

Rulebook: An 8-page full-color rulebook. It's got lots of illustrations and examples. Particularly handy is the reference of all the event cards on the back page, which got used a lot. I had some problems learning the game from the rules, but I think that was a reflection of the surprising complexity of the game, not the rulebook itself.

Overall, the quality of the components in Take Stock is quite good, and I'd be tempted to give the game a "4" based on that element of Style. However the event cards have very poor usability, and that definitely impacted both of my games, frustrating and annoying users, so on that front I'd give things a "2". Overall it averages to a "3" Style, with the comment that it improves whenever you're playing with a group of people entirely familiar with the game.

The Gameplay

The object of Take Stock is to earn the most money from playing stocks over four rounds of play.

Setup: The 5 "1" share cards are laid in the middle of the table, to mark the starting stock price for each of the five stocks. The remaining shares are shuffled, and each player is dealt 4-7 (depending on the number of players).

Each player is also dealt 4 options, which he'll later be able to use to play extra share certificates.

The event cards are shuffled and the "market closed" card is placed ten cards above the bottom of the deck.

Play begins to the left of the dealer.

Share Cards. Each share card corresponds to one of the five stocks and has a value from 1-12. In addition each card has a "certificate" value from 0-3, which shows the number of shares of stock you get if you save it. These two values are directly correlated.1-4 are worth 0 shares, 5-7 are worth 1 share, 8-10 are worth 2 shares, and 11-12 are worth 3 shares.

Order of Play: On his turn a player draws a share card, then either plays or discards a card through taking one of four actions:

• Increase a Stock Price; or
• Save a Certificate; or
• Draw Event Card(s); or
• Play an Event Card

Increase a Stock Price: Play a card to its stock line on the table. It must be greater than the current value for that stock, but no more than 4 greater. This increases the value of the stock.

Save a Certificate: Place a card in front of you as a stock certificate. There is a limit here: you can't play more stock certificates in front of you than the number of cards on the stock line with the most cards (counting share cards and splits, the latter of which are events which we'll get to momentarily). This prevents you from just playing all of your share certificates on your first several turns.

In addition you must discard a card when you play a stock certificate, thereby reducing your hand size by one.

Draw Event Card(s): You either draw two event cards, choose one of them to play, and discard the other to the bottom of the deck, or else you draw one event card, and save it for a future round of play.

There are 12 types of event cards, each of which has a different effect:

• Stock Split: Played next to the appropriate stock, and increases its multiplier for scoring (to 2x, 3x, or 4x, depending on how many splits have been played), but also discards the highest value card in the stock line.
• Stock Crash: Causes half of the cards in the appropriate stock line (rounded down) plus one split plus any freeze on that stock to be discarded.
• Market Crash: Acts as a stock crash for all five stocks.
• Insider Trading: Allows the player to recover up to three cards of the appropriate stock from the discard pile (discarding the same amount from his hand, to keep his hand size the same).
• Stock Audit: Allows the player to discard the highest value card or a split from any stock line.
• Stock Freeze: May be played on any stock to freeze it or to thaw a frozen stock. A frozen stock cannot have its value increased, cannot be split, and cannot be audited.
• Stock Option Gained / Lost: Each player gains one stock option or loses one stock option, per the event card drawn.
• Market Upturn / Downturn: Each player takes one share card or discards one share card, modifying their hand size, per the event card drawn.
• No Market Change: Nothing happens.
Market Closed: Must be displayed if drawn; immediately ends the round.

After drawing their event cards, the player must discard a share card from his hand so that his hand size remains constant.

Play Event Card: If a player had previously drawn and saved an event card, he may play it on a future round. He must then discard a share card from his hand so that his hand size remains constant.

Ending a Round of Play: A round of play can end in one of three ways:

1. When the "Market Closed" event is drawn.
2. When a player discards his last card (usually after playing a share certificate).
3. When a player plays an 11 or a 12 to a stock line.

Now each player has the option to use any of his options. For each option he discards he may play a share certificate from his hand to the table (ignoring the normal limitations for total number that can be played).

Finally each player totals his score for the round, multiplying the value of each stock (which might be doubled, tripled, or quadrupled due to splits) times the number of shares he owns in that stock.

All the shares are then reshuffled, with just the "1"s left on the table.

If the "Market Closed" event was reached, each player hands in his saved event cards, and they're all reshuffled. Otherwise, everyone can keep their shared event cards, and the discards are just placed on the bottom of the deck--which means that the "Market Closed" event will come that much quicker in the next round of play.

A new round of play begins with the player with the lowest score shuffling.

Ending the Game: The game ends after four rounds of play. The player with the highest sum of points wins.

Relationships to Other Games

Take Stock is a card-management stock-market game where players are using the same cards to increase the value of commodities and to gain ownership of those commodities. It's a pretty common mechanism for this sort of simulation, perhaps most recently seen in King of the Beasts: Mythological Edition. I think King's Breakfast is the game that does it best.

The Game Design

Every once in a while I play a game, and it confuses me, because the game doesn't really work and I can't quite imagine how it would work. I play it through a couple of different times with different groups, and then I finally throw up my hands and decide that the playtesting team got locked into some style of play that worked for them, but that the game fails when played with other people. Unfortunately, Take Stock is one of those games.

I played it twice, and the first game was the better experience. People didn't play many event cards, and things seemed pretty static, but there was some ability to try and push toward success. However, the people who got the best cards (e.g., the 11s and 12s) won.

The second time around people took lots of event cards, and this made the game entirely chaotic. Stocks were constantly set back, and it was hard to move anything to profitability. We twice had the entire set of stocks all sitting at "1" in the middle of a round, thanks to various crashes, splits, and audits. This game was pretty random too, but in this case it benefitted whoever happened to be in a good position after all the aggressive cards have been played.

Both games also had a singular problem: because of the limitation of when you could save stock certificates, some rounds were really hard to end, and seemed to drag on forever as a result. This happened once in our first game when everyone got a bonus card due to a stock upturn and two or three times in our second game, when the stock lines were almost always very short.

Overall, Take Stock strikes me as a flawed game for a few reasons:

First, it's got a lot of American-style take-that play, but the game's really too complex to match up with this sort of more casual audience. There's just too many weird special cases that you have to remember (which is made all the worse by the usability problems with the event cards). In particular the fact that you had to discard a card every round to keep your hand size constant confused at least a couple of people in each game. Issues like the stock certificate limit and what the individual event cards could do got forgotten some too.

Second, I don't think the math underlying the game works well. Mathematically there's a considerable disincentive to ever play the cards that are worth 2 or 3 as a stock certificate, and this heavily impacts the length of the rounds, because it means both that the stock lines don't get very long and that the "11" or "12" will almost never get played solely to end the round.

Third, the decisions just aren't that interesting. Most of the times your moves are pretty obvious and pretty well constrained by the cards.

Fourth, in any round where the event play is heavy the play starts to feel really futile, because it's almost impsosible to make any advances.

Despite its flaws, the game does have some interesting design. I like the idea of a round-based card game that's built in a very different style of play from the norm. I really enjoy the stock split cards (remove a value, double the total), because they were a pretty neat model for how a stock split works: the price can randomly go up or down. The option chips were also an interesting resource to manage. Finally, the interaction between round length, the saved event cards, and the market closed card was interesting, and resulted in some strategic depth.

However with its awkward gameplay, its decisions that are too simplistic for serious play, and its rules that are too complex for casual play, I can't particularly recommend Take Stock. I've given it a "2" out of "5" for Substance.

If it were a 15-20 minute game, I'd have been much more forgiving, and probably even enjoyed it more.

I'll offer one caveat to all that: each of our games played with 5-6 players. It's possible that it could play better with fewer players. There'd be a bit more control in most situation, but I still think there'd be some core issues with the math and the simplicity of the play.

Conclusion

Take Stock is a card-based stock market game with complex rules, simple decisions, and some awkwardness in design. I didn't find the combination appealing as either a filler or a serious game.

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