Boomtown

Boomtown: seven doomed companies -- own the last survivor and win.

A spiritual tribute to Acquire, Boomtown is a digital board game that lets you gamble in everyone's favorite casino: the stock market! 

Don't do the hard work of actually running the companies... own pieces of them and get paid when they get taken over hastily!

• Play locally in hot seat, use your phone as your controller in couch multiplayer mode, across the country in an online lobby against your friends or against a bevy of bots while you ... I guess win? ... capitalism by investing in completely doomed companies that you and your co-conspirators fellow entrepreneurs found. 
• View the board as a 3D city or in a classic board game 2D mode, using a day or night theme (woohoo, dark mode!).
• Sit on the one tile that would make your buddy's portfolio skyrocket, ruining them economically for as long as you like!

• Marvel at the fundamentally insane valuation of everyone's favorite battery superstore and purveyor of $70 HDMI cables, Radio Hut. 
• Buy up all the shares of Chapter Eleven, a bookstore whose name is also its business plan. 
• Choose to invest in any of over 25 different failed companies, each one a nuclear bomb waiting to detonate someone's 401k! 
• Merge them until the survivor's name is an unreadable, nightmarish car crash of every other company it ate! 
• Did we mention you can do all of this in 3D or 2D in dark mode?

• Call a vote to liquidate the whole town while you're comfortably ahead. Be careful though, if it fails, everyone gets to see your books.
• Get paid while you watch a nearly bankrupt bookstore chain make a last ditch effort at survival by acquiring your failing airline!
• Most importantly, watch it crash and burn to a cozy bossa nova and lounge jazz soundtrack... in dark mode!

Boomtown is a labor of love. When I was a kid, I fell in love with the game Acquire, mostly because it gave my idiot friends and me an excuse to yell incoherent nonsense every time a merger would happen.

What we have built in Boomtown is meant to be a love letter to that game - the goal wasn't to build a 1 to 1 faithful adaptation (for a multitude of reasons, legal and otherwise) but instead to remix the premise into something fun that (hopefully!) has as much staying power.

Early Access Plan

After an invite only (ie, the same idiot friends as above) play test, I'm opening this up for early access on Itch.io for the absolute minimum it will let me charge: $1. 

That's right. A whole dollary doo. And you get in on the ground floor. 

Truly, I am trying my best not to sound like a timeshare salesman here, but we're practically giving the game away.

Your purchase funds continued development, maintenance and hosting costs.

At a future date beyond this early access period on Itch, I hope to release Boomtown on Steam. If that happens, your purchase not only maintains continued access via Itch (which, ideally, will receive the same builds and maintain cross-multiplayer with Steam), your purchase locks in a Steam key if/when we release on that platform in the future. Two copies for the price of one!

My goal for the life of Boomtown is to continue play refinements based on feedback, and over time, to build new game features on top of the groundwork here, improving the graphics, refining the gameplay, fixing bugs, adding more music, sound effects and continuing to make the overall package feel like a top notch online board game.