Hidden Gem: Smartphone Inc. - The Economic Euro Hiding in Plain Sight
There is a specific category of board game that deserves more attention than it gets: the medium-weight economic euro that plays in ninety minutes and does something genuinely clever with a familiar theme. Most of them come from Germany or the Czech Republic, have functional but forgettable box art, and get buried under the avalanche of hobby hype. Smartphone Inc. is exactly that game. It has a BGG rating of 7.55 - comfortably above average for a well-designed strategy game. It holds rank #458 all-time, placing it well into the hobby’s top tier. And eight years after its 2018 release, it has been rated by fewer than 8,000 people. Compare that to Wingspan, which sits lower in BGG’s top games by average score but has over 100,000 ratings. The gap in cultural visibility is absurd relative to the quality gap. ...
