Business Mogul

In Business Mogul you play as the leader of a rising corporate empire, competing with your peers to amass the most power. Game play is centered around building an economic engine, and uses a bidding mechanic where players must balance bids to get the good stuff and to avoid the bad against the actions needed to build their empire, while saving high bids as much as possible to convert to cash at the end of each season.

The game has a fixed number of turns - six seasons of five rounds each - and total play time tends to be about 2-2.5 hours for 4 people (the game is designed for 3-5, with a solid 2-player variant), on par with a feature movie. In every round there is one card per player up for grabs - every player gets a card every round. The cards on which players bid are businesses that are used to build up your economic engine, extra actions to be saved until needed most (and they let a player do some things outside the normal rules of play), special agenda cards that give score a bonus at the end of the game (how much depends on how well the conditions for the given card are fulfilled), and bad events (which are to be avoided if possible).

Players are bidding pick order rather than on a particular item. Each players uses a set nine of bidding cards (getting them all back at the start of each season), which represent how the player is dividing their attention that round between trying to get the best of the available items and getting other stuff done. Each bid has a specific action that it allows (lower bids have more powerful actions), and bids saved for the end of the season are worth extra money - the higher the bid the more it’s worth. These additional aspects associated with each bid, the action and the end-of-season cash value, make for exciting, meaningful choices every round.

Business Mogul supports multiple valid strategies, though the highest final score usually goes to the player that dabbles in additional strategies beyond their primary one. The key to winning is being tactically smart about balancing pick order vs action vs end-of-season-payout, paying attention to the state of other player’s empires and the bids they've already used in the current season, and executing a strategy that adapts to the flow of items up for bid.

There are some fairly common game mechanics/attributes that Mogul specifically does not have:

• It has no player-to-player aggression - the bidding each round is the only point of direct competition.
• It does not have random action outcomes (that is whether or not a given action succeeds is not determined by dice, card draw, or anything like that).
• It does not have any kind of territory control.
• It has no resources / production beyond money and end-game score.
• It does not require memorization of what’s been played; aside from a single hidden card each player gets at the start and the particular bid a player is making in a given round, the state of the game is fully revealed.