FULL REVIEW

Gamewire Game Reviews
Patrick Korner
June 2004
USA

Introduction

In 1903, way, way back in the history of gaming in North America, an entrepreneur named Harry E. Gavitt, from Topeka, Kansas, released a new card game he called Stock Exchange. In it, players traded stocks from a set of six railroad companies back and forth, trying to ‘corner’ the market in one set (i.e. accumulate all stock in that company). The game was an immediate success, with (according to newspaper clippings of the time) millions of copies being sold. A copycat game called Pit (identical mechanically, but using grain types instead of railroads) was released the subsequent year, at which point the fortunes of the two games sharply diverged. Pit became a mainstay of family games throughout the next hundred years, and was released in various editions by Parker Brothers. Stock Exchange languished and eventually disappeared from the gaming landscape, not be heard from again until recently, when an Australian rediscovered the game and put the wheels in motion for its rebirth. Enter Out of the Box Publishing, who in 2004 re-released Gavitt’s Stock Exchange as the first in their new Heirloom Series of games, a series intended to reintroduce classic pieces of American gaming history into the modern world.

Components

Apart from the nice metal box that the game comes in, the components are decidedly low-tech – but by design. One principle of the Heirloom Series is that the re-released games should be as graphically similar to their original editions as possible. What that means in the case of Gavitt’s Stock Exchange is that you get a simple printed cardboard box containing a set of black and white square-cornered cards and a replica of the original rules. Also included is an updated rules insert that is better suited to learning and teaching the game than the original – although there isn’t much to learn for such a simple game.

The cards themselves are slightly thicker than normal and have a glossy finish, making them reasonably easy to pick up. The fact that they’re all black and white, and that the patterns for the various types of railroad stocks are all very similar, though, make them quite difficult to differentiate at first. It is difficult to chastise OotB for this design flaw, though, as their mandate was to avoid tinkering with the Heirloom games if at all possible. The cards are workable, but expect some confusion and cases of mistaken identity during your first couple of games.

Gameplay

Anyone who’s played Pit is quite familiar with the mechanics of Gavitt’s Stock Exchange. Players get a hand of stock cards dealt out to them (using a deck consisting of one set of stock for each player), and once the dealer yells “Go” of some other suitable phrase, players start trading their cards back and forth – simultaneously and often chaotically. One major difference from Pit is that in GSE, you’re only permitted to trade singles or pairs of the same stock – not threes and fours as in Pit. This change is likely due to the lesser quantity of cards in the game – Pit has seven sets of nine cards, while GSE has six sets of eight cards. You’re not allowed to trade two cards from different stock sets, and you must trade like for like (i.e. one for one or two for two).

There is also one different card – the Telegram – included with the game. Playing with it is optional, but it does add a little more chaos to the proceedings. After all the cards have been dealt out, the dealer adds the Telegram to his hand. Once the game has started, any player receiving the Telegram as part of a trade (note that it can be traded on its own or together with a regular stock card) must immediately pass it on again, hot potato style, to another player. The dealer must of course include the Telegram with his first trade.

When a player has cornered the market in their chosen stock, they yell Topeka to end the round. Why Topeka? Well, it’s the city where Gavitt lived and worked, so it’s as good a word as any, I suppose. The player who cornered the market gets double the value of his stock added to his total, while any other player who managed to at least get a majority in a stock gets the single value of it added. Thus, a player with all eight MoPac cards would get $300 ($150 x 2) while a player with five of the Santa Fe cards would get $250. Play continues until one player reaches $1000 (the original rules played up to $2500, but this was changed in an effort to shorten the game somewhat).

But what about the Telegram? Well, if the player who called Topeka is stuck with it at the end of the game, they lose $100 from their score. If it’s in anybody else’s hand when the round ends, they add $100 to their score. It’s a little random, but it can add some fun to the festivities.

Comments

I think the Heirloom Games concept has merit, and kudos to OotB for giving it a whirl. That said, I wonder a little about choosing GSE as the line’s debut entry. Yes, it sold a ton when it was first released, but it’s similar enough to Pit, a hugely popular game, to make many casual players ask themselves whether or not they really need two simultaneous trading games in their collection. It doesn’t matter that GSE technically came first; there are enough copies of Pit out there to almost guarantee that GSE will be compared to Pit, not vice versa. I might have held GSE back and released something more unique first, but then GSE wouldn’t have been re-released exactly 100 years after its first appearance. I suppose that the ‘Centennial’ marketing opportunity was too good to pass up.

That said, I think that GSE is a pretty good game. I do like its scoring system better than Pit’s (where only the winner of a round scores any points, everyone else gets nothing) and the Telegram card is a nice time bomb-type addition. It’s very simple to learn, and a very good after-dinner game for social get-togethers.

Where Pit has the advantage is in number of players – you simply can’t play GSE with seven, no matter how hard to try. Some have commented that the trading of threes and fours in Pit makes the game more chaotic and fun, but I feel that’s primarily a personal preference. My games of GSE felt just fine chaos-wise to me, thank you very much.

Overall, I would say that GSE is well worth picking up if you’re looking for a decent simultaneous-play game and don’t already have a copy of Pit lying around. If you do, then it’s up to you to decide whether the nostalgia factor is enough to make GSE a worthwhile investment or not.

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