Here players collect the four parts of their product design while raking in more cash, fine-tuning the management team, protecting their work with patents, and occasionally stealing opponent's unprotected product.

With a completed product and $15 million in cash, players head to the outer ring and compete for customers in a drag race to the end of the game.

At every step along the way, the game clearly throws out barriers and setbacks to keep players constantly challenged and eager to advance. This sets up a nice tension between speed and quality. One on hand, you want to endlessly go around each ring trying to get the best collection of people, plans, and product. However, whenever you're in the same ring as an opponent, you can steal the opponent's goodies (hire away their best staffers, "borrow" their product plans, and so on). That encourages you to move as quickly as possible from the inside rings to the outside. In one final spurt of deviousness, once you leave a ring, you can't go back. It's a one-way trip to the outside of the board. To win, you need to decide when to wait for quality or run for speed—just like in real life.

The Product Upgrade/ Downgrade and Review a Manager spaces on the middle and outside board rings bring a startling dose of reality to the game by arbitrarily changing the value of both product designs and staff. They both come in three values: low, medium, and high. Higher quality staff means more money during your second round of funding. A better quality product makes it easier to keep your current customers loyal while stealing customers from weaker competitors.

These spaces add a lot to the game without knocking the complexity up too far.

In a final nod to the realities of business, players can also purchase and merge with their competitors. The merger spaces maintain uncertainty over who might win the game by letting two weaker opponents combine forces against another player in a stronger position. The game's Purchase space works as a counter to that. A purchase works just like it sounds. If your company had the funds and you land on the right space, you literally buy another player straight out of the game—even if it means that you win!

Game play relies more heavily on die rolls than on pure strategy. One of the sessions I played eventually degenerated into a die-rolling contest to see who could hit a certain square first. (For the record, I lost the race—and to one of the designers, no less!) This major reliance on lucky die rolls weakens the game a bit by minimizing the value of strategy while prolonging the game's end beyond what players really need. On the flip side, the die mechanics also keep the game fun, fast, and easy for kids to understand. The rest of the game design and play certainly makes up for the randomness of die rolling, so don't let that complaint stand between you and a copy of Risky Business.

The designers displayed their real-life savvy in the board's outer ring by including major multinational corporations like Boeing, Goodyear, Hilton, Kellogg's, Pepsi, and Visa. Somehow, the designers convinced every one of those companies to license their name and logo design for use in the game. It's an amazing trick, but the ADventure Games people somehow pulled it off.

Reviewed by John Kaufeld

One of the world's top game designers once observed that someone could easily make a game about anything but business. The folks at ADventure Games apparently didn't know that when they turned out their first product, Risky Business. They did know about business, though, and pumped a lot of their knowledge into the game. The results make for a light, yet challenging strategy game that really works for gamers, their non-gaming friends, and the whole family. Because the designers kept everything abstract, players need no special knowledge to enjoy (and even win) the game.

Risky Business takes a whole new approach to business games by making players build their companies one step at a time, following the model of a classic start-up firm seeking venture capital. The game board presents the steps through a series of concentric circles.

Players start on the innermost circle, where they raise money, hire staff, and develop a business plan. Before they can move to the next circle, they need $6 million in funding, plus a complete business plan and four staff members.

The middle circle represents the product development process and the company's second round of outside investment.