Description

Small Store Survival is about an expensive shopping street where high rents make it hard for new businesses to survive. Most stores will not make it past their start up period and quickly get replaced by others. Only a few shops manage to claim a permanent spot in this shopping street. In Small Store Survival players are entrepreneurs who are up to the challenge. These cunning businesspeople will discover what it takes to let businesses thrive at this challenging location and successfully open store after store. Will you be the most successful one of them, who shapes the future of this prestigious shopping street?

Small Store Survival combines hand management and action selection in a new and challenging way: Each player starts the game with the same deck of ten cards. These ten cards represent the ten different stores you will try to open during the game.

Players start the game with five cards in their hand and five in their draw piles. Each round players choose a card from their hand and place it on top of a card on the table that was played in the previous round (one store replaces another store). When you replace a store, you are allowed to take the action of the replaced store. The game itself also has a store in play each round. This means that each round one store won’t get replaced. This is the store that manages to stay in the shopping street permanently and scores points at the end of the game. The cards that are played during this round are the cards that can be chosen in the next one. In order to let your store, claim a permanent spot, you will need to anticipate which action will not be picked in the next round.

Common actions like simply drawing new cards or reshuffling your draw pile are no free actions in this game. You can only perform them by replacing the stores that grant these actions. This makes hand management very tight. Store survival is all about selecting actions that allow you to effectively manage your hand. But even more about misleading your opponents by picking different actions then they expect and trying to read which actions other players will want or need to take. This makes Small Store Survival a highly interactive game which forces you to consider multiple aspects when selecting an action.

—description from the designer