PayDay

We saw PayDay at a yogurt shop in Morro Bay last weekend (see previous post), and it looked like it would be fun to try out, so we picked up a copy at The Game Seeker in Santa Barbara.  It was a different edition, with a much bigger format for the rulebook, but I don't know if there were any meaningful changes between the two.

It's another "roll and move and exchange money" game.  One player acts as the banker (which always turns out to be me) and one player acts as the loan manager (see below).  As a neat twist, the game board is a month on a calendar -- 31 spaces to get to Pay Day. You start by choosing how many months to play.  Pay Day is when all the activity hits the fan: you get a $3500 paycheck but have to pay all the bills you got on mail cards along the way.  You can also pick up Deals from certain spaces, which you may choose to buy or not, and when you land on a Found a Buyer space you get to sell a deal at full value.  The last few days of the month are mostly Find a Buyer spaces, so go ahead and buy a few.

Some of the other spaces are just unnecessary trades of dollars.  A Sweepstakes space says the bank takes $1000 and each player can choose to add $100, and whichever of the players who contributed the $100 gets to pick a number from one to six; if your number comes up, you get the full amount.  Not much fun for two people, and you can get stuck rolling 8 times until one of the two chosen numbers comes up, so we went with whoever rolls higher gets $1000.

You can take out a loan if you need to and the loan manager player would write that on the little loan sheet, and you can pay down your loan on Pay Day in $1000 increments, but we never used that at all.

Reasonably fun, but nothing really stood out as being special.  The Mail cards had some cute wordplay and funny gag advertisements, which gave it some character.