A game about the neverending balance when buying perishable goods.
The biggest challenge in the game is not “selling the most” or “getting the most profit”, it’s really “estimating beforehand exactly how much you expect to sell, and buy no more or less than that”.
Because buying more means all of that excess food perishes and has to be thrown out (and/or sold for way less).
While buying less means selling less. And maybe also a default “out of stock” penalty (that mostly rewards OTHERS because they can now sell what you didn’t).
To make that work, we’d probably need a simple “demand” system like this:
- Every round, random cards appear on the table. They are slowly revealed, players can look at them, players can add or take away cards.
- When the round is over, the entire demand is revealed and you resolve how much everyone sells. Whatever “first player” couldn’t sell goes to the next one, and so forth.
The name is a mix of Expired and Pirate. Other names might do something with Perished or Rotten.
(If we do go for “expirate”, then gathering/transporting those goods across the SEA seems like a logical thing to do. Though that definitely feels like an expansion/spin-off, while the base game should be kept simple and only be about purchasing the right amount of stock.)