Crude: The Oil Game (1974)

Crude: The Oil Game (a.k.a. McMulti) is a highly sought-after game with mechanisms similar to those in Settlers of Catan. This is an early euro-style game, which accurately simulates the market forces and elements of the oil and gasoline markets at all levels of production, including oil drilling, oil pumping, oil and gasoline buying and selling in the domestic and foreign markets, oil refining, and finally gasoline selling to the consumer.

In this game, each player is the CEO of an energy corporation and can risk drilling for oil, pump crude where they have struck oil, refine the crude oil into gasoline, and sell refined gasoline to the high-demand consumer market. The players also have the option to seek their fortunes by speculating in the oil and gasoline markets, both domestically and internationally.

In addition to allocating areas that they own for drilling, pumping, refining and selling to consumers, random economic events may occur, sending the economy into Recession or Rapid Growth (or even better or worse than that), which shifts the prices of all commodities and equipment up or down based on these economic conditions. News events also affect players by either rewarding or penalizing them for holding too many barrels of their commodities or taxing their facilities.

This game was originally published in the USA under the title Crude: The Oil Game, and was widely received as a break-through in euro-style and economic simulating games. It was then republished in an unauthorized version as McMulti without the knowledge of the original Designer. As McMulti, the game garnered even more attention due to its use of *hundreds* of beautiful little plastic pieces to represent the various game elements: oil barrels, gasoline barrels, oil drilling rigs, oil pumps, oil refineries, and gasoline station facilities. This game is certainly is a sight to behold.

In 2010, Stronghold Games announced a reprinting of the game along with an updated ruleset and and improved economic engine to be created in conjunction with the original designer, James J. St. Laurent. This will be a 2011 release by Stronghold Games, and it will hold true to the beauty of both the game's mechanics as well as the game components used in the unauthorized version.