review

The new start-up - success from personal engagement

Ground Floor

earn money and collect information

Start-Up companies are today’s hype and much talked about. Lots of people dream of founding their own company, of interesting many customers in their ground-breaking ideas and of finally of getting rich. Why not use this as a topic for a game?

In Ground Floor, players aim for exactly that goal - they found their own company and try to make it grow as big as they can manage. The enthusiasm that goes into founding a company does, however, not come across that well in Ground Floor; what remains is a solid worker placement game with some deviation from the classic standard worker placement rules. The topic itself is implemented, rather dryly, however; game board and game components are of a rather utilitarian design, too. For instance, you trade in commodities in Ground Floor, represented by small plain beige wooden cubes - no dainty sheep, no sheaves of corn or any other atmospheric meeples.

This is the 2^nd edition of the game, limited to 1000 copies.

Ground Floor is played over a fixed number of rounds. In the seven rounds of the game, players expand their company in more than one way, financially as well as in really building the company, because the building that houses the companies grows floor by floor in those rounds. Only the first floor, the Ground Floor, is already build at the start of the game and forms part of the player board. This board shows six offices which also serve as action areas for the placement of player markers.

Both the expansion of your own company over several levels/floors as well as the expansion of the offices on the ground floor are the main goals of the game, because both goals provide the main number of victory points at the end of the game, called prestige points.

In accordance with the standard mechanisms of a worker placement game, players put, in the individual rounds, their player markers onto action slots. However, not the workers themselves, or to be more exact, the employees themselves, are sent to the action slots; the employees only provide their contribution to the company in the guise of time: For each employee that a player hires, he receives three time discs which are placed for the implementation of actions. We, the players, are simultaneously CEOs of our companies and also provide our work time. Of course, as a CEO, we must work more than our employees and therefore provide four time discs!

That employees want to be paid, becomes painfully clear at the start of each round, because at that point you as CEO receive your income which becomes smaller with every employee that you hire. In case of full employment, which constitutes the CEO and four employees - the possible maximum that you can hire - the income turns into a payment that you have to make! With the construction of certain levels, however, the income per round can be enhanced.

After receiving income, players can hire additional employees. For that purpose, there is an Unemployment Track or Job Market on the board, which determines the cost for hiring the new employee for your company. At that point, turn order is the deciding factor - you hire in descending order there; turn order is determined by another track, the Popularity Track - because with each new engaging of an employee the marker advances on the Unemployment Track, which in most cases equals a rise in costs for hiring. Unfortunately, the new employees are not trained yet and therefore provide no time discs for the company at that point. Training employees takes one action which you must not forget to resolve, because otherwise the employee only reduces your income without providing a contribution to the company.

Two different means of payment are available in Ground Floor - one of them is money, the other is information, or info for short. In most cases you have to pay in both currencies, money and info, and most of the same time in equal amounts. For instance, the hiring of an employee from the job market costs the first entrepreneur five money and five info units at the start of the game.

When the hiring of new employees is complete, we can begin to plan the round. In this phase, players in turn put their time discs on an action slot, either on the central main board or in their own offices, until all time discs have been placed. Resolving of the actions provided by the action slots on the main board only happens in the next phase. This results in more efforts for planning and you must take care not to forget that means that are provided by actions will only be available after all time discs have been placed. On the main board, the action slots are assigned to six different shops in town that offer various services for companies. Those shops each have a different number of actions slots of equal value, which can only be occupied by one player. The respective action slots also state how many time discs you must place and if there is some payment due, and in which currency you must pay - money, info or maybe even commodities.

When a player puts his time discs in his own offices on the Ground Floor, the corresponding action is implemented immediately. This is very important insofar as that is the only chance to receive info or commodities in this phase; to accrue money at that point, you even need a certain, upgraded office. You are allowed to use your offices more often than once during a round. By construction additional floors for his company headquarters, you can make additional action slots available, however only for once-only use per round.

In this phase it is also possible to remodel your offices on the Ground Floor, the price for remodeling is three money plus three info. This improves the action in the respective office and at the same time the remodeled office is also good for victory points.

When all time discs have been placed, the shops on the central main board are resolved from left to right. With the exception of the last shop area, all other shops are designed to provide money, info or commodities. The last shop in the chain provides an action, the coveted action to expand you company headquarters, either by a complete floor or by individual offices for certain floor levels. This expansion, too, must be paid for again with money and info. The building of a new level is rather costly already on its own, but the price is increased by a surcharge that itself increases with every level already in place.

Those shops are designed very differently as regards to game play; nearly all of them deviate from a classic standard worker placement mechanism. There is, for instance, one shop where players must place time discs over two consecutive rounds to acquire the revenue of the slot - if you cannot place discs in two consecutive rounds, the disc placed in the first round is lost. Or there is a shop, where you must stash a certain amount of discs over various rounds to trigger the action; in other shops it is important in which order you place discs into the action slots within the shop; others depend on the current economic situation, which is defined for each round by an Economic Forecast card, which, by the way, represents the one and only element of chance in all of the game; yet another shop produces a fictitious commodity which you offer in the implementation of the action in another shop for a price that you determine yourself - depending on the Economic Forecast card, costumers now arrive at the shop, but how many are coming will only be known after placement. Those individual placement rules make the game varied and demand different considerations for every single shop.

At that point you must take into consideration that some of the shops also influence the Popularity Track which is the deciding factor for the turn order. Another important consideration for not neglecting this track is the fact that a bonus is paid out in every round which the player who is in last place on the Popularity Track will not receive!

When all shops have been resolved, the clean-up phase for the round is implemented. Here again, the chance element of the Economic Forecast card is coming into play, because it determines, how many out-of-work people will be available next round, which moves the marker on the Job Market track to a more affordable price. At that point, you can also lay off employees to increase your income. Of course, laying off employees also takes away their time discs! At the end of the second and fifth round, new levels are entering the game, which increase the options for the building action; new levels from round 5 onwards do exclusively provide prestige points for the end-of-game scoring.

When this phase has been completed, game play continues with the next round.

As a worker placement game, Ground Floor offers very many and many different options to place your „workers“. Already at the start of the game, you can choose from twelve different actions and, by expanding and upgrading your own company, you increase this multitude with some, sometimes very powerful, action slots. But over all those placement options you must not lose sight of the primary purpose of the game, which is to build up your own company, because this is the only element that will give you the deciding amount of prestige points at the end of the game.

The means of payment for the actions is also very cleverly resolved. As you usually need money and info in equal amounts, you as a player are always challenged to collect those monies in as equal amounts as possible. Lots of money without info is of no use, as would be the other way around.

I also very much like the combination of employees and the time discs that you acquire with them; the fact that more employees reduce the amount of income, is very harmonious and forces players to carefully consider the costs for deploying additional employees.

What I do not like so much in Ground Floor is the fact that the importance of the individual shops is very different. Thus, the Consulting Agency slot is more or less a must-have or must-do, because to neglect that nearly automatically results in a lack of info; on the other hand, the usefulness of the Stock Exchange is only very limited, as the revenue here is rather limited and only offers a reasonable amount of many if the Economic Forecast cards appear in a suitable order / combination.

In certain aspects, furthermore, Ground Floor is not tolerant of mistakes. If you overlook an important element, you are often forced to wait till the next round but one until the revenues arrive. This goes for commodities cubes as well as for money and info.

In addition to the basic game, the game comes with components for Automa players as well as new Economic Forecast cards and Event cards.

Bernhard Czermak

Players: 1-5

Age: 12+

Time: 120+

Designer: David Short

Artist: Harald Lieske

Price: ca. 80 Euro

Publisher: Spielworxx 2018

Web: www.spielworxx.de

Genre: Economics

Users: For experts

Special: 1 player

Version: multi

Rules: de en

In-game text: yes

Comments:

Worker placement with lot of planning

Many action options

Reduced to the core elements

Compares to:

Worker placement games in general

Other editions:

Tasty Minstrel Games (en, 2012)

My rating: 5

Bernhard Czermak:

Ground Floor has a lot of action options, which provide the resources for the game - money, info, commodities - in many different ways. For collecting victory points, however, only the one action to expand your company counts.

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 3

Strategy (blue): 3

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 2

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0