Game: Patential - Prescription for Success

Thread: Re: First Impressions

rwarburg — 2007-05-25T05:19:55+00:00

I like your comments and they seem very fair. The strategy in the middle to end of the game relates to how to get the right drugs in the pipeline and to interfere with what other players are doing. The reason for the competition is to stop someone collecting huge royalties at rather minimal cost to you. Say it costs you $50M to get into competition (and perhaps even $100M if you have to try 2 or 3 times), once you get there a person with diabetes drugs (the highest paying drug) drops from $70M to $12M per turn, and if they have two diabetes drugs from $120M to $24M - that is the payoff for you. Dont forget it cost them way more than $50M to get to the point of getting paid - you can really do damage to their cash flow at relatively low cost to you. For other drugs you have to weight the benefit dependent on the income potential. When you get the hang of it the game is very close each time and the luck of the dice becomes interesting but not so relevant. The two spots that allow you to take cards from the other players are very balanced but can really change cash flow and pipelines - you must always keep an extra space for a new drug to have this option open, which itself changes your pipeline. Good luck and have fun.

Thread: Re: Rules questions

rwarburg — 2007-05-25T05:12:12+00:00

Sorry for the long delay, I did not realize the question was posted.

1. The player loses a turn, for all pieces (usually the bad things that happen usually affect the whole company not just the drug, but in larger companies this may not be as true).
2. The player loses two turns.
3. Licensed - you get it in the status it already was (just like real life when you buy rights to a drug).
4. Yes, to both questions for the same reason as 3.
5. Yes on the first question. This is a bit unlike real life perhaps!
6. yes
7. Still roll, and still can move back.
8.(below) The $5M if you are in the last few squares, nothing elsewhere - but if you land on a square that says you have to pay something then you must pay that first or lose the piece.

Hope this helps, sorry again for the delay.

Thread: Re: Rules questions

stayman — 2007-01-15T20:12:10+00:00

I'd also add. It say as player may always a drug back to the begining by placing it there and paying the appropriate price? What is that price?

Thread: First Impressions

Psauberer — 2006-11-12T06:28:23+00:00

This one hit the table for the first time tonight. We had four players and started with the $5 million starting stake variant.

It was a disappointment to me. It seemed as if all of the decision making occurred in the early part of the game. After a certain point it became a matter of "lather, rinse, repeat" and the rolls determined the outcome.

The early game was promising. There were options there and choices to be made as far as when to start a drug and which path to take it. Money was tight and balancing the need to shepherd a drug through the approval process against starting other drugs was interesting.

However, once the money started flowing, the decision making dropped off. There was no incentive to license a drug, as ownership was easy and more lucrative. Skipping the patent track also became unattractive as the payoff was so much better for a patented drug and the time saved by going straight to clinical trials would not be as profitable.

Competition was never used as the price to get involved was not likely to be recovered. The risk was not worth the potential reward.

Another unpleasant part we had was with the number of roadblocks in the way. There seemed to be a very large number of missed turns and being sent back to a previous space. When you are trying to accumulate $1 billion dollars about $40 million at a time, losing a couple of turns multiple times lengthens things out due to nothing more than luck.

The game lasted over 4 hours. It became repetitive for far too much of that time. Maybe playing with a lower victory amount would help. I am not sure whether that much of the game changes after the first $200 million other than some players get luckier than others. At this point I don't see the game making a repeat appearance.

Thread: Rules questions

Psauberer — 2006-11-12T06:09:40+00:00

This one hit the table for the first time tonight and we had a few questions while we played.

1. When a piece lands on a "Lose a turn" space, does the player lose a turn or is it just the piece that does not move in the next x number of turns?

2. If two pieces start on the same space and the roll sends them to a "lose a turn for each piece on this space" are the pieces considered to have moved independently or together? I.e., if there were no other pieces on the space doe the player lose one or two turns? (or does the first piece lose one turn and the second lose two if it is pieces and not players who lose turns?)

3. If you have a "Buy a Card/Roll for a card" situation and the card in questions is licensed, is it still licensed if an opponent buys it or is it now considered owned outright?

4. If a generic drug enters the last few spaces of the Drug sales track it can be sent to the patent track for $5 million. If the drug is licensed does it remain licensed if "recycled" in this way? Can a player pay the purchase price in addition to the $5 million to remove the license?

5. A generic drug is on the sales track. A patented drug is moved to the sales track. Is the patented drug just paid out at the generic rate and then can be paid at the patented rate once the generic drug leaves the track? Or does the patented drug get flipped to the generic side and actually become a generic drug.

6. If a competitor situation arises and no litigation ensues does the patent holder being competed against collect at the generic rate?

7. In an Interference situation, do owners who have just generic drugs of the type involved still roll? If so, and they are the lowest roller, do they still have the opportunity to move the drug to the "Apply for Patent" space?

Thread: User Review

TomVasel — 2005-01-28T13:47:02+00:00

Patential (Self-published, 2004 - Richard Warburg) has a theme I don’t believe I’ve ever run across before, securing the right to develop drug inventions. The goal of the game, gaining $1,000,000,000 - while ambitious - is nothing new, but the game certainly has a unique theme. Players are attempting to obtain patents for drugs, working through a long process of patenting and testing them, so that they can eventually sell them for a huge profit.

If you don’t mind a “roll-and-move” game in the genre of Monopoly, then this is probably the best one I’ve played. There are some meaningful decisions in the game, and some of the choices can be nail-biting. At the same time, the vagaries of the dice can really affect game play, so this game will have mixed reactions. I really enjoyed it, as a light diversion and didn’t even mind the theme (I actually found it interesting.) The game starts out slowly, but suddenly a player will collect huge amounts of money, which is very gratifying. Patential won’t go down as one of the greatest games of the year; but it was certainly an enjoyable time for when I played it, and those who I played it with (both teens and adults) enjoyed it.

Each player (up to four) takes three clips of their color, setting them in front of them. A board is placed on the table, on which a shuffled deck of Invention Cards is placed. Stacks of money, from $100,000 bills to $250,000,000, are placed in a “bank” area, and a pile of invention tokens is placed near the board. One player is chosen to go first, and then play proceeds clockwise around the table.

The first thing a player does on his turn is roll a six-sided die (with numbers “1” to “3”) on it. The number rolled is equivalent to the number of million dollars the player receives from the bank. The player then has the option of buying or leasing an invention card. Each invention card can be bought (which is an extremely high price, ranging from three to thirty-six million) or leased (which is a fraction of the buying price - as low as $100,000). If the player buys the invention, they flip the card, showing that they owe no fees on that invention. The player then takes the corresponding token for that card and places it in one of their stands - “generic” side up. The player then pays $100,000 and can place the invention on either an “Apply for Patent” space or on the “Enter Clinical Trial” space. The board has a long wrap-around track, and starting on the “Apply for Patent” space is at the beginning. This means that a player who starts there will have a much longer time before their invention hits the market; but they have a chance to patent it, gaining a more massive amount of money. Players can have a maximum of three inventions at a time and can discard them if they want to buy/lease another one.

The player then rolls a normal six-sided die and moves all of their inventions that many spaces on the track. Inventions move the full amount, unless they pass a space with a stop sign, where they must stop and follow the instructions there. Many spaces require the player to pay a fee - which must be paid immediately, or the invention is removed from the board. When an invention finishes the patent track (if chosen), the invention is flipped to the “patent” side and moves to the clinical track. At several points along the clinical track, as well as the start and the beginning, there are places where the player must pay fees listed on their card; unless they’ve “bought” the invention. Once a player has finished the clinical track, the NDA approves the invention, and the player moves to the “collecting revenue” track. Many spaces on this track will cause the player to pay a royalty to the bank (if they’ve leased the invention) or receive revenue. The revenue received is always a hefty chunk o’ change, and even more so if the item is patented. (For example, Infectious Disease Invention 1 gives a player nine million if generic, and twenty-four million if patented). Once an invention reaches the end of the collecting revenue track, the player either discards it or pays five million to start the invention at the beginning of the track again.

If playing with “Competitor” rules, players may try to compete with any player who has an invention piece in the collect revenue track. The competitor must have a generic invention of the same type (color) as the person they are hunting, or they can even pull one out of the stack of unused invention cards. The player can then pay twenty million dollars and automatically enter the revenue track. The original player with the patent can then sue the copy-cat, paying five million dollars to initiate litigation. The competitor must pay five million or lose their piece. If they do pay, the owner can still roll a die, with one of the two pieces being discarded (depending on the roll).

A few other rules are important to the game. A player can choose not to roll the dice and move their piece, instead of just saving up money. Players can also make deals with other players with any terms they wish. Play continues until one player collects one billion dollars, at which point they win the game.

Some comments on the game...

1.) Components: The game isn’t component heavy, but I’m very impressed for a self-produced game. The tokens are of good quality and easily fit into the plastic clips, which I’ve seen in many games. The cards are of excellent quality, with all the necessary information easily accessible on them. The money is fairly generic looking, but who can scoff at a one hundred million dollar bill? Everything, including the two good quality dice, fit inside a box with some business-like graphics. The board itself looks like your typical “roll-and-move” board but is very cleverly laid out, so that the intersecting tracks cross at the correct points. Each track has a different color, and each space is very easy to decipher. The spaces that have more detailed explanations actually have a listing printed on the side of the board, so confusion is kept to a minimum.

2.) Rules: Both a one sheet “Quick-Start” rules and a twenty page booklet are included with the game. The quick-start rules are pretty much all you need, but the book does help clarify a few little rules and even has a ten page glossary with drug terms. The rules could have been formatted a little better; they were easy to read, but I didn’t understand how the game worked until I read the quick-start rules. The game is simple to play, and pretty much anyone will easily understand it.

3.) Theme: If I tell people that a board game I have is about drugs, they will have pre-conceived theories that the drugs are evil and illegal. But this game is about the true-life drug companies, which are probably just as evil. I don’t know how many people I’ll attract with the theme, but the game at least fits the theme.

4.) Roll-and-Move: I’m not opposed to playing a game where you roll dice and move a piece around the track, but I usually don’t seek to play them. But this one is different. A player has up to three pieces moving on the track, can start them at various points on the track, and can even choose to move them or not. Yes, a player can have bad or good luck when moving their pieces, but the choices they make are much more important.

5.) Strategy: Knowing when to buy or lease an invention is usually pretty obvious; it’s all a matter of if you have the money or not. Knowing where to start the invention is a much harder choice. Skipping the patent process saves you a lot of time, and you can get the invention on the market faster but for a far-smaller profit. Knowing when to just sit on your pieces and when to move them is also just as important. Sometimes a player has to take risks in the game, but most of the game can be planned out in a calculating way. Getting your first invention into play is a long arduous task, and players may think that it will take FOREVER to get that billion dollars. But once a player markets one invention, it’s a lot easier to get other inventions into the market. Suddenly, the money starts flowing in, and competitors become a viable and dangerous strategy.

6.) Competitors: Players can choose to play without the competitor rules, and I introduce the game to kids without them, as they add complexity to the game. But with this complexity comes some real play balance as well as some good strategy. Players can try to “piggyback” off of someone else’s hard work, but take the chance of being sued. Players can sue those who leech off their success, but take a chance of losing their own shirt in the process. Either way, players must carefully know when to apply the competitor rule.

7.) Fun Factor: When the designer of the game first contacted me about it, I almost turned him down, as the idea of a roll-and-move game really didn’t appeal to me. But after reading the rules, I was intrigued; and I must say that I had a lot of fun. There were meaningful decisions, and who can deny the fun in collecting millions of dollars. There was too much luck in the game for it to be anything more than medium-light, but it’s certainly one I’ll keep.

Patential certainly has a unique theme and has good mechanics for its genre. The game is too lucky for people who don’t like roll-and-move, so I wouldn’t recommend it to them; unless they are people who like Monopoly with the original rules or games such as Careers, where luck plays a large part; but the player has many choices. There are a lot of people who will enjoy the game, however - I gamed with many of them. The game’s theme has the potential to teach students about drugs, while giving them money skills at the same time. Either way, people will have fun in a race to get a lot of money! I mean, isn’t it fun to have one billion dollars in your hand!?

Tom Vasel
“Real play board games.”

Thread: User Review

otrex — 2005-01-18T20:28:34+00:00

OVERVIEW: Patential - Prescription for Success covers the topic of Drug Companies, and their need to constantly seek out new, profitable drugs. Players can pick between patenting their newest creations, or just getting it to the market quickly. The downside to not seeking a patent is the lower payoff when the drug does hit the market, and that other drug companies (players) can quickly bring generic copies of your drug to market themselves.

Each turn a player must decide if they wish to start a new drug in the required phases of patent/testing. The decision to start a new drug or not weighs heavily in the game, as each new drug brings new risks of financial collapse. A wise player will usually not take the opportunity to produce a new drug on every turn, and rather concentrate on gettin the ones he/she already has to market so the payouts can commence.

THE HIGHS: The theme in this game fits quite well. It actually feels like progress is being made towards a drug's completion, and it's quite satisfying to finally get the drug to market. It's also refreshing to see that a player doesn't have a pawn on the board representing themselves. Rather, their company's drugs are what move around the board, and in an interesting twist, they all must move according to one roll of the dice (not separate rolls for each drug).

For what appears to be a self-produced game, the components are of quite good quality, with a full assortment of money, and plastic stands for the stand-up drug pieces.

THE LOWS: The money, while nicely produced, appears to have been produced all in equal lots. The high turnover bills (1 Millions) are constantly in short supply, whereas the 250M dollar bills remain untouched for most of the game. It's also a bit of a chore passing out money to each player, as there are plenty of payouts on any given turn.

The game feels a little bit long for it's complexity. It's not a difficult game to learn, but with the game lasting until someone hits 1 Billion dollars, it does seem to drag once all players are making money and not in any danger of collapse. Along those same lines, it does also feel a little too easy to guarantee your own success once you pass $100M or so (although the first part of the game can certainly make players sweat).

OVERALL IMPRESSION: Typically, I am not interested in the classic roll-and-move style, so to be honest, this game started out in my "highly doubtful" catagory. That being said, I was impressed to see that the old monotonous "roll-and-move" boredom of Monopoly fame was not present in this offering. In fact, my impression is that this is about as far as a designer could stretch the dice mechanic, and the designer should be credited for such an accomplishment.

I don't feel that I should recommend this to the more hardcore Euro-Gamers that may happen to read this review. It simply doesn't have the mechanical "guts" and subtle tactics that you may be accustomed to. Unfortunately, I tend to fall into this group, although I'd certainly play Patential over a game of Monopoly any day (or pretty much anything from the roll-and-move genre)!

Given that this game feels like it is targeted at a family game-night crowd, I think it would make a fine purchase for those people who want some strategy, without a complex game system to learn. If you enjoy games like "Fast Food Franchise", or pretty much anything that Parker Bros. has done in the past, there's a distinct chance that you'd like this one as well. Add in the fact that it has a very unique theme, and it could become one of your favourites.

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rwarburg — 2004-12-20T13:00:54+00:00

Invention Card

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rwarburg — 2004-12-20T13:00:52+00:00

Money - a quarter Billion

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rwarburg — 2004-12-20T13:00:50+00:00

Invention piece

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rwarburg — 2004-12-20T13:00:49+00:00

The game in progress

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rwarburg — 2004-12-18T14:09:28+00:00

The playing board

Thread: Re:Quick Comments

dboeren — 2004-12-16T20:40:06+00:00

This is a brilliantly conceived shill! Game designer and his friend logon and rate his game with a 9 and a 10!

Yes, I'm sure compared to Candyland (basic roll and move game of luck) this may be a reasonably good game. However, the standards are higher now than they were 30 years ago. To compare yourself to a roll-and-move games is akin to a new car commercial where they claim "Our car is better than riding on a donkey!". Perhaps a bit more effort will let you describe the game in terms that actually tell us something about how it is played.

If you truly believe that this game can stand on its own merits, I suggest posting a copy of the rules so we can all read them and judge the game for ourselves. Perhaps consider sending out some review copies to major BGG reviewers as well.

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rwarburg — 2004-12-05T14:35:03+00:00

Thread: Quick Comments

starks42 — 2004-12-03T18:46:31+00:00

This is a brilliantly conceived game. Good fun to play - it's both competitive and addictive since the aim of the game is to be the first player to make a billion dollars!
The game is based on the entrepreneurial process of developing pharmaceuticals but no prior knowledge is necessary. I certainly had no idea about this beforehand and enjoyed learning about it as I played. Patential is part luck on the roll of the dice but part strategy in making choices on which pharmacuetical to develop and how you spend your money on it. This makes it far more engaging than a basic roll and move game of luck. Highly recommended.