Acquire Night

Over the past decade, four friends and I have been playing Acquire. We average four nights a year when we all get together at someone's home and play three games for the night.

Total accumulated winnings for the evening determine the winner and runner-up, who then share our prize pool in a 2:1 ratio. The pool is pretty small, P500 each plus fines for latecomers and for the last to arrive. The pool just brings a bit of excitement to the game.

The complete rules for Acquire are here.

We've been playing so long that when we first started, the game looked like this, with a Dracula-type banker on the box cover. (It was produced by 3M, the Scotch tape guys. The modern version above was developed by Hasbro.)

On Acquire Nights, we bring our wives, who gossip on their side of the table while the five of us play and chat on ours. (Note that I'm being politically incorrect by saying the women "gossip" while we "chat," as if our talk was any more substantive than theirs.)

Over the decade, four of the five of us have remained with the same spouse, which is a pretty good batting average for Manila. Also, about five children have been added in that decade, which is a pretty low figure for the country.

Acquire was invented by a board game designer named Sid Sackson in the '60's (interesting job title). Sackson also collected games and when he died (in 2002), had over 18,000 in his collection. As a nice touch, when Hasbro updated the game, they named one of the corporations Sackson (although they also used it for the cheapest corporation, which is kind of a cheap shot).

There are various websites that talk about the history of the game, its rules, variations, tournaments and all sorts of Acquire trivia. Naturally I read through it all, especially since there's nothing to do when nobody else is at home.

The point of all this is that we had an Acquire Night last night and I just now figured out we've been doing something wrong all this time. We've always dealt each other $5,000, and just tonight I read the exact rule:

Each player begins the game with $6000 in cash ($1000 x 4, $500 x 3, $100 x 5) and six tiles picked at random for their starting racks.

Oops, time to return all bets!