Mergers & Acquisitions: The Hostile Takeover Game

In this game, you become a business owner attempting to increase your company's profits through hostile takeovers of other companies. You have investment money of 1.2 billion dollars to finance your coming mergers and acquisitions.

Your goal is to buy other companies at a relatively low price compared to their value. If you control that company, your company's profits will increase as well.

The basics of the game:

There is one more business than there are the number of players, each with different company values. Players each have 14 chips with investment values printed on them (4 X 5, 3 X 10, 3 X 50, 1 X 100, 1 X 200, 1 X 300, 1 X 400). They (usually) secretly place these one at a time near a business they wish to invest in. The 2nd, 5th, and some later investments made in each company are made publicly (everyone sees the investment amount).

Players gain control of a company by having more invested in the company at the end of the game than any of the other players (and get more points for having more than all the other players combined). The tricky part being that a player will almost always need to have control of 2 or more business to win, but there's not enough businesses to be able to do so easily, so each player will have to out-invest another player, which involves bluffing them as to where your high-value investment chips are.

Each player also chooses an 'investment strategy' card at the beginning of the game, and plays it at some point during the game, changing things like making the value of a company halved, or giving them extra shares in a company, etc.