High Society



Ever wished that you had enough money to buy your very own island? Ever wanted to be able to give a beautiful woman so much money that she’ll be your and do anything you want? This game gives you that opportunity (and the woman is one of the cheaper things available). Welcome to Reiner Knizia’s High Society

The players are newly wealthy, and are competing to see who among them can accumulate the gaudiest total assets with the same amount of money – but not without being the poorest after all is said and done! This will take wits, skill, a bit of memory, and a gut of steel. It also will take oh, about fifteen minutes tops.

The new uberplay edition of High Society is a bit overproduced, resulting in a game that’s not quite as portable as it should be. In exchange, it has a higher price point than it probably should. Good thing it’s an excellent game. You get five sets of plastic-coated smallish money cards and sixteen thick linen-finished asset tiles to bid on. This all comes in a box too big to stick in your back pocket, but small enough to pack into the small spaces in your gaming bag left over after the big boxes have gone in.

The Game



Each player has eleven money cards, each of a different denomination (from $25 million down to a measly $1 million). The asset tiles are shuffled into a stack. Each turn, a player turns up a tile and opens bidding on it. There are ten white “real” asset tiles, each valued from 1 to 10 prestige points. The 10 is your very own island. The 1 is a home entertainment center. (The lady I was talking about earlier is worth 2 prestige.) There are three red “2x” doubler tiles, which double the prestige value of a player’s assets (cumulative). Then there are three blue “zinger” tiles: a thief that swipes a “real” asset, gambling losses that deduct 5 from a player’s score, and the dreaded Taxman tile, which halves the value of a player’s assets (well actually the Taxman is a red tile in presentation, but a blue tile in nature – more about that in a bit). Players bid for whichever tile is up in sequence, raising or passing.

Why is this game so good?



There are four delicious twists that make High Society one of the best “fillers” out there:

Twist #1: You can’t make change. This creates a hand management problem as your ability to bid in small increments is limited by the small change cards you have.

Twist #2: When bidding for the blue “zinger” tiles, players are bidding to AVOID taking the tile. Players must either raise, or take the tile. When a player claims the tile, he gets all the money he bid on that tile back, everyone else spends the (bribe) money they put up to avoid the tile. Ouch.

Twist #3: The game ends when the fourth red tile is turned up (the three doublers, and the Taxman are the red tiles). This gives you a game that’s variable in length and one that has its anxiety level ratchet up once three of the reds are sold off. Watch the money fly! (To see the same concept at work in a “bigger” game, see Knizia’s other bidding biggie, the succulent RA.)

Twist #4: Whoever has the most prestige from assets wins. BUT everyone counts their cash. Whichever player (or players, if there is a tie) has the LEAST CASH left at the end of the game is a LOSER. You could have an island, a mansion, a basketball team, a girl, a private jet and a yacht, but if you’re broke then you’re a LOSER. What fun!

Twist #5: In the event of a tie, the tied player with the single highest valued asset wins! Ok, so that’s not really a twist. At least it breaks all ties with finality.

Strategy



It’s a fifteen minute game, who cares about strategy?

Well, I guess I do. High Society favors a player who can keep track of how much money (and which money cards) each player has left. This is because you can spend up to $1 million less than the guy or gal who has spent the most. If you know who’s spent the most, you know who’s an automatic LOSER, so you don’t have to bother with that fellow.

In addition, the values of assets tend to creep upwards as the game nears its end. Therefore, I’ve found that it’s far better to bid to win early, rather than late. After the third red tile appears, who knows how much people will be spending for that 3-prestige value Picasso? The low to midrange assets also tend to be cheaper on a $ per point basis than the big ticket items, simply because everyone wants to have his own island, mansion, or Los Angeles Lakers. Try to gauge the $ per point range of your play group and see how much it varies.

Players tend to become irrational when the zingers come up. I’ve found that the $ per point ratio is higher than the norm for the gambling debts tile. You can protect against the burglar buy buying the home entertainment center or the woman so he has something cheap to steal if he comes calling. A cardinal rule is to try to make sure that all your rivals put money in the pot before you claim a zinger! Don’t give anyone a free ride.

Finally, managing your hand is critical. Resist the temptation to dink and dunk with the $1m to $5m small change cards. They tend to be most effective later in the game when your less prudent opponents have used them and are forced to raise bids by $10m or more because that’s all they have left in their hand. If you know you’re going to be willing to bid $25m or more for them Lakers (and one would hope they come with the Laker Girls), use the big money boldly.

If all else fails and you lose your shorts in the bidding wars, then you can always say “let’s do that again”. It only takes 15 minutes.

Reviewer’s Tilt

This is the best filler I’ve played. For a short, fast and cheap game, it packs a lot of agonizing decisions and player psychology into its 55 cards and 16 tiles. If your gaming group gets up to 4 to 5 players regularly, and you have no aversion to bidding/auction games, you can’t do much better for a filler than High Society.



Fawkes (2/8/2005)