Smartphone Inc. Overview & Review

About Smartphone Inc., from BoardGameGeek:

In Smartphone Inc., you become a CEO of one of the largest smartphone-producing companies in the time when smartphones were only beginning to conquer the world. Research technologies, develop your factory, build your worldwide office network, and outprice your competitors to become the most profitable and successful smartphone company in the world. Smartphone Inc. is an economic simulation Eurogame. Over five rounds, players program their decisions about price, production, research, and expansion. The game features a unique mechanism of planning, which combines patching mechanisms with bidding and action selection. Each of the rounds consists of eight simple phases: planning, pricing, production, development, research, expansion, selling, and profits. In the planning phase, all players simultaneously make decisions for the next year by overlaying ("patching") their two plan cards and all of their development tiles. The actions they plan on their cards and tiles in this phase will determine what actions they can perform during all of the later phases. In the pricing phase, players change the price they charge for their smartphones based on their plan. A lower price helps to go earlier and sell more smartphones on the market, but a higher price, while risky, helps players to earn more money. In production, all players produce smartphones. In development, players take development tiles, which expand their planning possibilities in future rounds. In research, players discover new technologies. Each technology not only expands players' ability to sell smartphones to customers, but also gives them special powers they can use during the game. In the expansion phase, players open offices in neighbor regions, which allow them to sell in that region and develop their network of offices to more regions in further turns. In the sale phase, players sell the phones they produced in regions where they have offices. But there is limited space in each region - and if your price is too high, cheaper rivals can block you from selling. In the profit phase, players get income for their sales. Players gain the sale prices for all of their sold smartphones, and the player who sold the most phones in each region gains a bonus for controlling the accessory market. At the end of this phase all sold smartphones are discarded from the map - and a new round begins. After five rounds, the richest player wins.