Billionaire

Billionaire is a wealth building game released by Parker Brothers in 1973. The goal of the game is to be the first to become a Billionaire. Luckily this is not another Monopoly clone, the similarity is that the game play involves bidding and auctions. The game can be played by 2-4 players. At first glance you'll notice a smaller board with only 20 action spaces, and 4 headquarters.  This leads me to believe that it's a much shorter game to play than Monopoly, reviews list average game time as 60 minutes.

Players rolled the dice and can land on profit, power play, sealed bid, analyze or headquarters spaces. The profit cards are cash in this game, each player starts with 5 profit cards. When they land on the space they take the top card from the pile. 

Power play cards may be played at once or held for future use. They are returned to the bottom of the pile after use. They come in the categories; Power Play, Security, Disaster, Espionage, Proxy Fight, or Analyze Any Investment.

When a player lands on sealed bids, the top card from the corresponding pile is up for bid. Players will write there bid on the bidding slates. The player with the highest bid must pay the player who landed on the space, using his profit cards or investments cards (trading value). If the player bids $3 Million and wins but only has a $5 Million profit card, they must turn over the whole card without change. If the player wins but bids more then has, he does not go bankrupt. He must forfeit his most valuable investment card and place it back in the deck to be reshuffled. If he has no investments, he returns his most valuable profit card to the deck to be reshuffled. Then the remaining players bid again.

When a player lands on Analyze the player can select an investment card from another player and use the Analyze tool. The investment analyzed must be the least valuable investment, this protects the higher value ones. The tool is a spinner, one side is red and one side is green. After spinning you take the action of the corresponding color group. The result can be the Analyzing player takes a property card or profit card, both, or 2 profit cards from the pile on the board. When a player lands on an opponents' headquarter space they may also analyze one of their investments.

The game ends when the first player makes it to a Billion or the board runs out of profit cards, at which time the player with the greatest total investments wins. 

This is just a basic overview of game play, more in-depth instructions can be found by clicking the link here. Overall this sounds like a fun game to play, sealed bidding adds some extra excitement to the game.  My only negative comments about this game, is that being from the 1970's we see a middle aged white male on the cover and all for sides of the game board. It's 2024 if this were to be re-released I would hope to see some more diversity at the top.