Make Out Like a Fat Cat with Raccoon Tycoon's Newest Expansion

Raccoon Tycoon blends anthropomorphic animals in Victorian clothing with a quasi-historical setting as players race to buy and sell commodities, towns, and railroads in a light, but fun stock market game. But there’s always room for more cuteness covering for cutthroat trickery, which is why Forbidden Games has announced the Fat Cat expansion! (Now on Kickstarter.)

Fat Cat brings more of everything! New railroads, building tiles, towns, and meeples to add to the game’s complexity. And with so many new components and options for gameplay, it only seems appropriate that the greatest gift the Fat Cat expansion delivers is room for more players! Now as many as 6 guests may don their 1880s best in a fast-paced game of rising and falling commodity prices, auction-bidding, and business acumen.

There are some changes to the gameplay introduced via the Fat Cat expansion, but care was taken to not entirely affect the core mechanics of the base game. The biggest – and perhaps most notable – is how the new bonus tiles, railroads, and towns allow players to create bigger engines on which to build their burgeoning Rust Belt empires. New town bonus tiles such as the Electric Company and Waterworks provide players with one victory point for each town card they acquire. Similarly, new railroad bonus tiles will allot one victory point for each railroad card in a player’s tableau.

There are also new actions that provide new avenues for endgame victory points. For example, players with the Locomotive Factory tile can build locomotives (represented by 8 train-shaped meeples) for the cost of one iron and one coal. Players can then decide to place one locomotive meeple on each of their railroads for three victory points per locomotive at the end of the game or sell them to the bank for $20 to leverage at auctions.

Where Raccoon Tycoon’s original set-up allowed for player interaction as a disruption to one’s own gaming philosophies, Fat Cat, while still maintaining the market fluctuations and mechanisms of the base game, does allow for each player to become more focused on their individual strategies. However, due to Raccoon Tycoon’s core gameplay, cobbling one’s gains together to create a streamlined engine of commodity gains, money, and victory points will still require player interaction and a bit of take-that (especially with 6 players vying for accumulating wealth with overlapping objectives). There’s just no avoiding the influence of a group buying and selling commodities in a race to buy property (and to make the most out of their accumulated gains) – in fact, it’s still the main principle to success.

While there exist strong facsimiles of capitalism in similar settings, few have the cute factor of Raccoon Tycoon, and the Fat Cat expansion only makes the game more adorable. But don’t let the artwork and fantasy fool you, as Raccoon Tycoon is truly an immersive and invigorating economic board game that will make you weep in faux anger just as much as it’ll make you cry out of its sheer animals-in-clothing joy. Fat Cat only adds to this robust roller coaster of emotions, making it a worthy addition to the Raccoon Tycoon family. If you're a fan of the original game, be sure to check out Fat Cat on Kickstarter.

Disclosure: this is a sponsored preview. It contains our impressions of the game based on the rules and a description of the game provided to us prior to the Kickstarter campaign.