With a name of Ulcers you might be expecting some sort of medical board game, but that isn’t what Ulcers all about. From the box…
Ulcers is the fun game that gives you power over people. You sure a Vice-President or promote your Salesman. Your President demands more money. Someone steals your Secretary and your Sales Manager quits. You raid another company to fill your empty offices. But, boy have you got problems! People change hands at a wild pace as each player tries to collect his company office stage. Just try and keep your personnel; If it is happening… you have Ulcers.
First impressions of Ulcers
Just looking at the bright pink box and the bubble writing of Ulcers tells you that this is a 1970 game. Published in 1973 by Waddingtons you instantly note that the box is in both English and French, much like I remember some of their other games like Ratrace were. This seems to have been done so that games could be sold into the Canadian market easily and this version of Ulcers does have a note on it saying that it is Copyright from House of Games Corporation Ltd, Ontario, Canada.
The game board has a simplistic look. Almost plain by 70s standards. However the number of colours and patterns used on the squares makes up for the plain white background!
1970 office sexism is also alive and well in Ulcers. All secretaries in the game are female, and all other roles are undertaken exclusively by men. What a surprise!
Aim of the Game Ulcers
The aim of the game in Ulcers is to collect all the office staff that you need to run your business. An office requires two Secretaries, two Sales Men, one Sales Manager, one Vice-President and one President. As you go around the board you land on squares which allow you to appoint different staff as you find yourself on the appropriate square.
Pay levels
Where Ulcers gets a bit more interesting is what you pay your staff as this is not prescribed. When you appoint a staff member it is up to you as to what to pay them. This could be as little as $5,000 or as much as $200,000. The only rule is that you need to follow the company hierarchy. A more senior person can not earn less than someone more junior than them. However, they could be paid the same. A player can “raid” another players staff via certain squares on the board, and in doing so take a member of staff to pay them more than they were on there. This means that it doesn’t always make sense to pay everyone the smallest salary, but you also can’t afford to pay everyone $200,000.
When a player hires a staff member they place their card on the “company’ in front of them. This “company” is a long piece of card with different slots in for the different pay levels that they can have. It makes it visually easy to see how much everyone is paying their staff and the pay hierarchy inside the company. (The paper cards also remind me a lot of the status symbol cards in the 1973 version of Ratrace that I wrote about a few years ago.)
As you go around the board it may be that you can increase your cash reserves by undertaking the Business Venture track, or if you’re called to pay out the Payroll and can’t you might have to go round the Payroll track. You also might need to deal with industrial action from your staff – another of the minor tracks on the board. These latter two can affect not only your cash holdings, but also you night end up with losing a staff member or two!
How to win the game
The first player to fully staff their company AND return all the way round the board to the start of the new fiscal year is the winner. This final bit is important as it could be that someone has all the staff they need, but then a member of staff is raided by someone from a different company.
Comedy Rules
I know I keep referencing Ratrace here, but once again I’m going to refer to how when I reviewed it I spoke of how the rules for the game were written in a comedy question and answer style. Exactly the same is true for Ulcers. They’re well worth a read, but don’t lend themselves well to being read aloud when trying to explain the game to other players. That’s probably why you don’t see modern day instructions written this way.
Similarities to other Waddingtons games
The other thing that you instantly note from Ulcers is that there are some similarities with other Waddingtons games from that era. As well as the main circular board there are three diversion routes on there. If you land on a specific square (the ones relating to Business Venture, Payroll or Strike Action) then you are sent down these routes and for the time that you are on them you throw only one dice to proceed. This is very similar to when you follow the career paths in Careers. Also like Careers are some of the Ulcers cards which allow players to move a certain number of spaces on the board, and these can be held until a player wants to use them.
Passing the arrow where “New Fiscal Year Starts Here” is marked is similar to passing Go in Monopoly. You collect 50,000 when you pass or a whopping 100,000 if you happen to land on the square. The Business Venture subtract is also a bit like when you gamble on the Stock Exchange in Ratrace.
Our Ulcers Experience
We played a three player game of Ulcers and really rather enjoyed the game. We liked the interactions between players that come from being able to raid another player’s staff.
Towards the end though we ended up in a position where all three of us just wanted to hire a President and yet none of us ever ended up landing on the right square. We had all our other staff in place and there was therefore no need for anyone to raid anyone else. We’d also all earned so much money from the Business Ventures track (which all of us went round multiple times) that the first player to land on the President square could instantly pay the President the maximum salary and this made them safe from other players too. Sadly a bit of a tedious and predictable end to our game.
Whilst playing we found earning money relatively easy, and if anything we’d say that the game needs more banknotes. Only at one point early on did a player run out of money and even then it’s easy to get more. None of us ever had to go round the Payroll mini-track as we could always meet our payroll obligations when required to do so.
It might be that all three of us were just lucky, or just that the game works better if you have four players. When you look at the starting set up for the game, for a three player game you set up the Personnel pool with six Secretaries, six Sales Men, three Sales Managers, three Vice Presidents and two Presidents, meaning that is only Presidents that are in short supply.
In a four player game the set up is a bit different: seven Secretaries, seven Sales Men, three Sales Managers, three Vice-Presidents and three Presidents. This means that there aren’t enough staff in the Personnel pool at all levels, so we expect it creates much more interaction between players. Next time we plan to play with four players and see how it changes the game dynamic.
We all thoroughly enjoyed Ulcers, and if you overlook the 70s sexism I’d actually say it’s still remains a good game. More than just a roll and move as you need to think strategically about how you pay your staff and where you might try and get them from too.
Ulcers was published under the Waddington’s House of Games label in 1973. There was also a slightly different version published again by Waddingtons in the 1980s. Copies of both are generally available online via either eBay or Amazon.
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