Business Cycles

Business Cycles is an abstract game of chance and risk aversion. In Business Cycles, players play the role of entrepreneurs or CEOs directing three separate businesses over the course of a 40 year career. The winner is the player who retires with the greatest lifetime earnings after shepherding her businesses across the board. Business Cycles is played in turns; on a turn a player rolls two dice and moves one or two business tokens along the game board, which is a track with 40 spaces. Some spaces have positive effects, some negative, and some require the player to take a card, which may be positive, negative, or neutral. Players must use both dice if possible and two tokens may not occupy the same space. A player one of whose tokens lands on a positive (profit) space immediately takes another turn, and continues to do so until she ends a turn in which she has only landed tokens on negative or card-drawing spaces. Bearing business tokens off at the end of the board must be done by an exact roll; once one player has borne off all of her businesses, each player who went after her in the initial turn order gets one more turn (so that all players will have had the same number of turns). At that point, the player with the most money wins the game.