I like Sid Sackson’s Acquire a lot, it’s a fun tile-laying game that incorporates stock and rail type mechanics into a simple, effective design with a ton of potential for chaos, backstabbing and excellent combos. It’s easier to get to the table than Tigris and Euphrates since it’s hotels and stoNKS which people seem to gravitate towards a bit more than the more esoteric entities/factions in Tigris. Acquire should be in every gamer’s collection….
….And yet it’s been 24 years since we had a good version of the game! The last version that was comparable in components to the original 3M 1960’s release was by Hasbro in 1999 with their excellent ‘tech company’ version with beautiful molded plastic towers and all plastic tiles/tray to play on. Naturally, that version went out of print and started to command massive prices, especially since every single version after it flew so far off the mark component-wise, none of them were even worth looking at. For a long time, if you want a playable version of Acquire, you bought the 1964/8 or 1971 version at 30-40$. Why? Acquire is a tile laying game that absolutely requires a molded plastic tray, readable tiles and tray numbers, as well as some sort of plastic hotels. Many companies ran through versions of Acquire trying to cheap it out and just do cardboard with tiles. The game just does not work without the molded plastic tray to hold the hotels/buildings: with one small bump of the table, YOUR GAME IS FUCKED. Sure, you can put it all back together again, but the critical heuristic part of Acquire is not having to do that, which the original version from 1968 had no problem fulfilling.
Now we have the RENEGADE Games version and I am very pleased with the quality of the components in addition to having an excellent tile tray that really locks in the tiles. The buildings are cool looking, cards are all very clear and well designed and if you do happen to have the holy grail Hasbro version, is in a much smaller, more portable box than the 1999 big box game.
If you’ve never played Acquire, it is Sid Sackson’s masterpiece of design and I highly recommend the Renegade games version now before it to goes out of print!