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Space-Cast! #17. Making Magnates Work

Wee Aquinas has *opinions* about this one. But for once he's keeping them to himself.

What goes up must come down. That’s the proposition of James Naylor’s Magnate: The First City, the modern Monopoly that sees its housing boom through to the inevitable bust. Today, James joins Dan to chat about real estate development, game development, and what makes Humbleburg more of a “first” city than the many counter-examples that are undoubtedly popping into your head.

This month, we’re making a donation to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Please consider making a donation of your own or searching for ways to help your local homeless community.

Listen over here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.

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That Magnate Moment

Once again, I struggle to escape from the shade of "Magnates, How Do They Work?" as the best title for anything ever.

James Naylor’s Magnate: The First City is an ambitious opening act, a fact only made more appropriate by its wicked irony. In my preview, I compared it to Monopoly. Plastic buildings, paper money, rents, dice. They even share a setting, focused as they are on unregulated property development. It’s almost as though the entire real estate industry is so shot through with corruption and profiteering that its only natural gamification is get-rich-quick fantasies.

Unlike Monopoly, though, Magnate’s satirical perspective hasn’t been neutered by corporate plagiarism. Instead, it rushes toward a single inexorable conclusion. This will undoubtedly be the game’s most controversial aspect, but to strip it away would be to remove the whole reason Magnate works, both as a plaything and as a statement.

I’m speaking, of course, about that game-ending housing crash.

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Housing Crash: A Look at Magnate

Naturally, I reflexively went with "Magnates, How Do They Work?", but that title was already taken by my Food Chain Magnate review. Sigh.

It’s both accurate and misleading to say that James Naylor’s Magnate: The First City is a good version of Monopoly. Accurate because it’s a satirical take on unbridled capitalism that would do Lizzie Magie proud. Misleading because the two really don’t have much in common, aside from paper money, city development, plastic houses, and dice. Okay, saying that out loud makes them sound really quite similar. They’re not.

Seriously, they aren’t alike at all. You should keep reading. I promise.

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