Acquire Review
From 1964, this investing classic has a lot to offer 60 years later.
Buy stocks in hotels, hold them, and sell when the time is right! Who can be the richest as you merge hotels with hostile takeovers? This Renegade Games reprint brings back this modern feeling classic. 2-5 players, 90-120 minutes.
Video published January 24th, 2024
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Invest in 1 of 7 hotel stocks.
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Continually track the payouts of hotels!
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Play around the central merges!
How many times played
4 Player: 3x
5 Player: 1x
Need to learn how to play? Or want more reasoning for our points? Our review video’s got you!
Component/Art Pros
Hotels shapes give personality
Especially compared to old versions
Insert provides vertical space for cards
Setup Pros - Its extremely fast given 90 minute runtime!
Shuffle tiles facedown, deal $, then start
Don’t have to shuffle stocks, worry about certain board setup since you make it as you go
Easy to learn Pros
Just explain: buy stocks and see value go up
On your turn, just place a tile on its location, then buy up to 3 stock
Can explain the merges once players know simple turn structure
Included player aid helps with turn structure and merges
Rulebook is good with plenty of diagrams/examples
Gameplay Pros - Investing vs. divesting in stocks well done
Everyone starting with $6k is perfect amount
Enough cash so can buy a bunch of stocks without going broke early
Not so insanely lavish can recklessly invest in every stock
After a couple of big buys, need to be conscious about going to 0
Need to have spending discipline if feel like no merges coming up (since that’s only way to get $ through stockholder bonus)
Keep eyeing player tendencies and hotel placements
Might want to pivot to buy the cheap stocks, or no stocks on a turn
Need to know how and what stocks planning to sell when merges happen
Can get tons of capital if full sell, but can partial hold stock just in case hotel gets revived
Gameplay Pros - Luck managed very well
Investments totally up to you, and no one “owns” a hotel, so ride off of other hotels’ success
Hand is 6 tiles which gives great flexibility
Every tile can be good/bad depending on board state
Bunch of silly islands means spots to later potentially revive hotels
Merging tiles can even be bad if not getting any shareholder bonuses
Not really any terrible starting hands
Insanely unlikely to get all 4 corner spots
Gameplay Pros - Good player interaction
Want to win 1st or 2nd place in quantity of stock when hotel is merged into, so keep paying attention to others’ buys/sells
Remember each hotel has 25 stocks to give out
Pay attention to see if game going to be ended early
Can inform you to buy some last minute stock before game ends
Or revive hotel before game end
Or end the game yourself!
Can bait/encourage people into placing certain tiles, by placing stuff diagonally to existing hotels
If diagonal tile gets eaten up by hotel, it means +2 size instead of +1 in a turn
Can bluff certain placements by pretending have a lot of 1 area of the board
Gameplay Pros - Even more optional player interaction
Mix of hidden cash/stocks let you silver tongue
e.g. say have a bunch of a certain stock
e.g. bluff have thousands of $
e.g. say you have a merge but you don’t
Gameplay Pros - Central Merge mechanic is very crunchy
Only way to inject $ into game, so can withhold merges if $ isn’t going to them
When reveal for stockholder bonus, know how much each stock people have, so great memory refresher
As mergemaker, possibility to buy stocks after merge makes merging decision more crunchy
Want to merge 2 hotels together, then buy 1 at the new cost?
See how many stocks someone had right after merge, then pivot buying strategy?
Can wait for someone else to do the merge instead of you
Since selling is done in turn order, can wait to see how others sell or hold onto shares before making an action
Late game mergemakers can take all of the remaining hotel stock before anyone else can, as trade 2 to 1 with bank
Gameplay Pros - Turn order balance
Especially neat for game that ends immediately once conditions are met
If go 1st, get tempo of free stock from founding and maybe more turns
If go later, have more knowledge on what’s good, and more hotels to invest in
But will have less options to create new hotels because many will be founded
Gameplay Pros - Neat Progression!
Hotels spiking between 2-5 size encourages very dynamic play early
People buy lots of their stock and seek to expand them
As hotels start slowing down in 6+ realm, game doesn’t slow down because merges are likely to happen as board runs out of space
Many climatic merges littered throughout the game as people do stock reveals and pivot investments
Mid late game: typically 1 huge hotel that sucks everything else up, have to play around that
Late game cash becomes even more crucial to have because stock prices are so high
Timing Pros - Very true to 90-120 minutes
Every turn is moving game towards its end because filling up board
Random islands in corners will eventually come into play
You can delay early-mid game pacing, but can’t slow down game length entirely
No phases to keep track of and bog down turns
Clever contingency that if people play weird, just end game if 2 hotels are 11+ tiles
Theme meets gameplay Pros
You are all speculators/investors who buy/dump shares
You want companies you are a part of get sold to bigger company to make big bank
Diversify your portfolio to play well!
Component Cons
Paper money is awful quality
No player screens to block hidden money, so paper is single sided
Back of paper is literally all white
Replace with poker chips or metal coins ASAP
Buildings have useless orange blips
Randomly placed, fall off between sessions
Not worth effort to all put on, just put on ones you like
Worldwide and American hotel colors too similar
Purple vs. dark blue
No components to keep track of hotel chain size
Once start hitting above double digits, hard to tell size at a glance
Can just stack D6/D20 on board, but is a little fiddly
A tracker to side of board for each stock would be nice
Recommender Score - 9/10 Excellent
Sure this is an immensely lazy reprint at $50 MSRP, where the components are stuck in the past, like the tiles are really nothing special visually… it feels like a cash grab. But Acquire is still a very solid game, and nothing severely is detracting from it.
Acquire is a memory and math game with hints of reading the table and some optional negotiation. And it only runs 90-120 minutes! As such, it appeals to a LOT of different players: those who want pure economic crunch, those who want to dick around and just invest for fun, those who want a serious family night, or even those looking to get into more economical games before they get into cube rail like 18XX.
It’s this mix of hidden information, yet tons of calculative possibility on the sheet that lets you invest with your gut, or you can actually sit down and math everything. It’s easy to learn, but still a mentally demanding game that rewards keeping tabs on others. Every tile placement matters, and every stock buy matters to eventually get that perfect merge.
In fact, Acquire has a really high skill cap in that you can just memorize all the buys, and all the cash that people have, then start reading people very well, kind of like poker. Once you play it a BUNCH with other high level people, you can start speculating people’s hands, like… I’m pretty sure one of these tiles to make this perfect merge I see coming up is in one of the other people’s hands.
Acquire is the evaluating your stock portfolio on a spreadsheet… no like it IS a spreadsheet as your player aid! It’s a game where you can’t just screw around and win… but hey it still holds up as that elegant economic experience, and Monopoly (30 years older), does not. Oh, and it feels SO ahead of its time in being so short for its multiplayer complexity, no wonder Acquire is still being continually talked about as THE investing classic.
Next, let’s talk about player count. Now we haven’t played 2 player, with its own ruleset, but its feels a bit weak. Essentially every time you merge, the game introduces a robot “fake” investor that also competes with you on shareholder bonus by flipping a facedown random tile, the number is its strength. This obviously throws out the memorization dynamic of the game, but it still works, since the robot does have an average, and you can math out what the robot would place based off what tiles are used. Just keep in mind that 2 player doesn’t have the same multiplayer investing dynamic and thus doesn’t play to Acquire’s strengths very well.
As for 3 player, it is probably too easy to track the 2 other people at the table, and there’s again just not as many investing inputs in the game. It works, it really is based off of the memorization and control you’d like to have: keep in mind that every time there’s a merge, 2 out of the 3 people ARE pretty much going to get the stockholder bonus.
We think 4 and 5 player is the sweet spot, and the difference there is how much you’re ok with waiting until it gets back to your turn. That is, the more people it is until your next tile placement, the more room for things to go wrong with your plans. There’s just a lot more risk with more investors! Oh also keep in mind that with more players, there’s gonna be less stocks for each of you, you never change out the 25 stocks from the game.
