Magnate: The First City Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Magnate: The First City, a city building board game published by Naylor Games. In Magnate: The First City, players are building up a city hoping to make the most money before the market collpases.

As a socialist and a gamer, any board game that somehow manages to highlight the contradictions of capitalism is going to be appealing to me. And let’s face it, the hobby has only recently moved past the well-trodden terrain of romanticizing—or at the very least presenting without critique or context—the myriad horrors of colonialism and imperialism. So when I first heard about Magnate: The First City, the first game from fledgling designer and publisher James Naylor, I knew it was something I had to play.

Magnate is a 1-5 player economic city building game where players take on the role of money-hungry developers descending upon the unspoiled idyll of Humbleburg after a recent city council vote removed all zoning restrictions. The blood is in the water, and the sharks are hungry! But, folks, this is capitalism, and we know the party can’t go on forever. Eventually, greed begets disaster. That knowing wink and nod are built right into this simple design, with an inevitable game-ending market crash that you as developers are responsible for bringing about. And just like real life, the people who will suffer the consequences are not the developers.

In Magnate, each game round is broken up into 5 phases:

Bidding for turn order is exactly as it sounds. Players bid in $100k increments for the delightful first player marker, an actual toy backhoe. This is followed by phase two, attracting new tenants and collecting rent. There are 4 different types of building units in the game: Residential, Retails, Office, and