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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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Some games stick with you because they were just that enjoyable. Other games you will never be able to forget because of how horrible your experiences with them were. And then there are some games that linger in your brain just because there’s nothing else quite like them.
For me, Employee of the Month falls into the third category. It isn’t a bad game. It is a decent little game to play and I don’t mind playing it. There are plenty of better auction games out there, though, and there are no end of light games that take under a half hour to play.
To be bluntly honest, if Allen Moon and Aaron Weisblum’s names weren’t on the box, I probably would have never picked it up.
However, it is the only auction game I have ever seen where the players essentially share the same pool of resources. If there is another game out there that does this, I’d love to know so I can take a look at it.
The game is made up of three different decks of cards. A deck of suspicion cards that are worth negative points. A deck of brown points cards, which come in two flavors: straight up positive brownie points and circumstantial kudos points. A deck of favor cards, which are really bid cards. Those also come in two flavors, coworker and boss.
The essence of the games breaks down to this: Every round, a brownie point card and a suspicion card get auctioned off. However, the players don’t have their own individual pool of money or resources to bid with. Instead, there is a row of favor cards and players, in turn order, either pass or pick one of them as their bid. Whoever bids the highest gets the brownie point card, the suspicion card AND the favor card. The favor card is replaced and you start a new round.
At the end of the game, only the player who has the highest value of coworker or boss favor cards (or BOTH) gets penalized by the suspicion cards. If you’ve managed to have the highest value in both suits of bidding cards, you get hit by a double whammy. The brownie points are points, period. The kudos cards, however, act like inverted suspicion cards. You get those points only if you have the LOWEST value in a suit of favor cards.
The end result is that Employee of the Month is a quirky little game that is more memorable than it really has any right to be.
The game isn’t perfect. Card counting can distort the game play to the point of possibly breaking the game. One complaint that a friend of mine had is that whoever does the best job card counting has an almost overwhelming advantage. I don’t know if that’s true but I did observe that the theoretical strategy of banking on kudos falls apart when other players put the pinch on it.
The random draw of cards also can lead to issues. Sometimes, like a high suspicion card paired with a low brownie point card or like a row of high value favor cards, it is too obvious that making any bid is a bad. At that point, everyone passes and the round wipes without anything happening. Which is boring.
The game has an element of brinksmanship, not unlike High Society, but the random order that the favor cards come out keeps it from being nearly as tight. High Society keeps the tension tight throughout its short playtime. Employee of the Month, the tension sometimes hisses out like a punctured tire.
In the end, if it sounds like I am damning the game with faint praise, I am. Employee of the Month isn’t a painful experience. It is a perfectly serviceable game that can be fun. However, it is also, in all honesty, a mediocre offering from two designers who have given us much better games. Allen Moon, in particular, has designed games that are so much better it’s not even funny.
And yet… and yet…
For all that, Employee of the Month sticks with me. The quirky auction mechanism where all the players essentially share the same bank roll is one that made an impression on me. I am sure it has been used before but I don't ever remember it being quite like this. The game might not be a great one but it is an interesting oddity.
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