When it comes to the ‘board game’ genre of video games, many tend to fall into one of three categories: The ‘Mario Party’ style where you navigate through colourful boards enjoying a range of RNG and skill-based mini-games until you determine the winner; the physical board game turned into a digital counterpart, and then you have the more niche ‘money making’ board game — with such examples being Square Enix’s Itadaki Street and the subject of this review, the Richman series. First released on the PC in October 2022 and ported across to consoles just last month, Richman 11 is the 11th instalment in a series that commenced almost three-and-a-half decades ago, challenging players to fill the shoes of one of 16 different characters, build up their empire on a game board, and achieve financial supremacy by bankrupting their fellow players.
Richman 11 is a surprisingly fun game, whether playing solo or getting together three additional mates locally or online. The gameplay loop does sound a little dull at first. If you grew up on a healthy diet of Mario Party like myself, the idea of just throwing a die, landing on a space, buying/upgrading/paying a fee for property and then rinse and repeat sounds pretty dull. Especially, when you factor in the ability to play the stock market instead of fast-paced mini-games… yay numbers! But you know what, my reservations about this gameplay loop were short-lived.
The combination of creative items that could genuinely turn the tide of battle, game-defining positive and negative event spaces, and obtaining equally game-defining genies never made the game feel too one-sided, where one player could rule the roost from the beginning and suck all the fun out of it for other players. There were times when I was left dastardly low on funds and one wrong roll away from bankrupting my character, there were other times the tides turned in my favour and I received a few free property upgrades that my poor opponents landed on, and others I was weighing up risks and rewards for potential action. While I sadly only got to play against NPCs, their difficulty level dubious, I envision that a few friends could make a great night out of going against one another.
An area in which Richman 11 falters a little bit is its production values. The game’s different boards were all very pretty, as were the 16 characters which offered a diversity of humanoid player characters to rival that of the random assortment of objects found in games like Monopoly. But on the opposite side of the spectrum, the localisation was very patchy – and more than a year and a half since release I would have thought they’d have done a second pass of the text. Furthermore, while there is English voice acting, the lines for each character were very limited in number, and for some characters pretty grating. In addition, while you can sort of pick up the game and go, the tutorial was lacking and outside of teaching you the basics of controls, didn’t teach you much about the gameplay systems that will determine if you win the board or not.
While a minor qualm, and more so if you are a trophy/achievement hunter, the trophies for Richman 11 are incomplete compared to those offered by the PC Steam release (11 vs 57). The decrease in the number of accolades on offer isn’t the development team making them harder to obtain. Instead, all but one is of Gold level and is a mishmash of winning using a couple of the game’s characters and winning on specific stages. It means you could finish a board and get two trophies/achievements, or none at all, purely based on choices irrelevant to difficulty.
While probably a very different ‘board game’ game from most on the market and very much aimed at a different market, Richman 11 provides a solid, no-frills experience that delivers its core gameplay loop right, offers a few different modes to spice up the experience and is a game which I could envision picking up now and then for a game or two – much akin to a traditional board game. But with some localisation qualms, many of the maps feeling similar, and the production quality just not being up to the same standard as their competitors on the market, there is much that the development team at CMGE could do to leave an assumed future Richman 12 with a more lasting legacy.
A review key was provided by publisher EastAsiaSoft to facilitate this review.
Richman 11 is now available on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, in addition to the original PC version now available on Steam. While the game is digital-only as of writing, physical editions are set to be made available in collaboration with Funbox Media Ltd and GS2 Games in June 2024.
