You will not pass go in Fortune Street, but you will collect dividends

Posted by on December 6, 2011 in Reviews

Fortune Street is no Monopoly. It’s actually a serious — you know, serious — boardgame. Don’t be fooled by the occasional minigame and Nintendo characters like Birdoe, Mushroomhead Guy, Princess Peachley, Doofus, Doogie, Hocker, Loogey, and Luigi. They’re just window dressing in an earnest mix of market speculation, real estate development, risk management, and die rolls with an occasional Candyland style slide when you least expect it. What’s more, Fortune Street doesn’t rely on the crazy turns of fortune that frequently upend Culdcept or Dorkapon Kingdoms*. Fortune Street wants it to be your fault when you lose, so it relies on 80% careful calculation and 20% luck. Fortune Street isn’t fooling around.

After the jump, this ain’t no Monopoly

* I know it’s not actually called that, but I can’t help myself.

Like Monopoly, you buy property. Like Monopoly, when you land on someone else’s property, you have to pay a fee. But unlike Monopoly, you buy and sell stock, which pays dividends. The price fluctuates based on upgrading the property and the shares of stock bought and sold (I’m pretty sure I keep losing because I’m making bad early choices about stock purchases). Although the various boards have plenty of funky spaces that do things like change the layout, shoot you across the map, or drop you into a brief minigame — these are the Candyland slides I mentioned — the basic motivation for each player is to get around a circuit to collect suits by passing specific spaces. These suits are then cashed in for lump sums of money. You also occasionally draw from a spread of cards with random gameplay tweaks. It’s just enough whimsy to keep things unpredictable, but not enough to subvert the actual strategy.

I can see why this is a 20 year old design. It’s good enough that I’m not surprised people have been playing it since the early 90s, even if they only Japanese people. This is the North American debut of a game called Itadaki Street else in Japan. To help Wii-ify the action, Fortune Street insists on pressing your Mii into service. You earn points after each game to unlock costumes and animations for your Mii. But to Fortune Street’s credit, you don’t have to unlock many of the boards or gameplay mechanics. Almost everything is available from the start.

The AI is brutal and effective once you move past playing against the low level ringers like Shy Guys and slimes. For some reason, a bunch of characters from Dragon Quest are in here. Don’t ask me why. Must be a Japanese thing. The interface works pretty well considering the amount of detail. You’ll have to put up with some background clutter, as every board hovers over a pointless 3D landscape, some of which are busier than others. You can speed up the AI turns and turn off the character chat, which means you can easily play a full game in under an hour, with only a minimum of licensing nonsense in your way.

Fortune Street has online play against complete strangers, but who’s that desperate, especially when the AI is good. However, this is an ideal hotseat game, since there aren’t any hidden pieces (I’m still astonished at how poorly Culdcept fumbled this). But if you’re planning on introducing Fortune Street to the family, good luck. A simplified rule set is available, but this ain’t no Mario Party any more than it’s a Monopoly clone. If your kids/wife/girlfriend/parents can grok a finicky numbers game, this will be right up their alley. But otherwise, this is a videoboardgame for hardcore strategy nerds. Who don’t mind playing with Miis.

4 stars
Nintendo Wii

  • Len

    That’s great news they are releasing this!  I’ve been wanting to play it since I read about it a few years back.  50 bucks seems high.  Maybe I should ask for a review copy…

  • D.Z.

    I’m so glad to read your impressions about this game. My friends and I have been playing the series for something like 15 years and it’s nice to finally be able to get more people into it, including my wife.

    You nailed what makes the series so great: once you get it, it’s a randomized board game mostly impervious to luck. If you play as what I like to call the “Asshole Tycoon Persona”, it can be awesome. It essentially boils down to freeloading on stocks as much as possible, manipulating stock prices and not shying on buying out properties. A well executed strategy can definitely make up for crap luck. The fact that on advanced boards the overall topography matters in strategic choices is a nice bonus.

    Getting first to the bank remains one my favorite ways to sour a relationship. :)

  • Anonymous

    How would you guys know about this game?  I guess I just don’t keep up with the Japanese videogaming scene, but I can’t imagine a more obscure title, especially since I assume all Japanese-only releases are RPGs.

  • Hayley Winter

    I got to play this at PAX a few months ago. I had a lot of fun but it wasn’t enough time to really dig into it. I was sad to see nobody playing it most of the time when I passed that area.

    Was hoping it would arrive at about $30-35…Not sure I want to drop $50 on it. I’ll surely be keeping my eye out for some sales.

  • Anonymous

    I was surprised to learn this series has been going strong since 1991.

  • Paul Drager

    I really like this series and I’m glad it finally made it over here as I was sick of playing the games in Japanese.

  • Kelly Wand

    Stop dissing Culdcept, bitch!

  • Guest

     I don’t know if you ever reply to or even have a way of seeing notifications of comments for older articles, but I thought I’d answer your question. Presumably they know about the title because the games are designed by Yuji Hori, a.k.a. the creator of the Dragon Quest games. I think you probably knew that since you made a joke about the Dragon Quest characters appearing in the game.

    Anyhow, since Dragon Quest and Yuji Hori are well-known names, the games he’s designed are also rather well known and I believe several of the past games have been fan-translated emulators. Even if they haven’t, the series got a great deal of attention a good 8 or so years ago when Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest in Itadaki Street Special was released for the PS2, including Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest characters. It was the first time the merged Square Enix actually combined their properties together and made quite a bit of news.

    I imagine those are the two reasons its well known, but perhaps a third reason that a similar long-running Japanese board game series recently saw its last installment released, because the creator quit in a mad fit with the management of the company. This was a seen as a sign that the company he belonged (Hudson) was closed to closing forever. When I saw reporting of this incident in the Western press they often compared the game in question (Momotaro Railways) to Mario Party or Itadaki Street.

    BTW, when Japanese people play this game, we say “itadaki” (or “don’t mind if I do, thanks) when we get your money, gloat and smile and generally be terrific assholes. If you can’t turn into a terrific asshole when you play a board game, this game isn’t for you.

  • tomchick

    Guest, I see every comment, even on older articles! Thanks so much for the background info. Sometimes I wish America could have more cool things like Japan has. :)