Capstone Project - Benchmark Research - Hotel

Hotel (Milton Bradley 1986) or alternatively known as Hotel Tycoon (ADC Blackfire Entertainment 1974) is a Tycoon style board game most similar to Monopoly, but on a much smaller scale (Anon, n.d). The board layout itself is relatively simple, consisting of one flat board with designated areas for hotel development, A track, and a collection of 3D hotel pieces you use to develop your plot of land with as you go (The Lucky roll 2018). The hotel pieces are what make this game so unique, coming from a personal experience of playing this game as a child, i loved the amount of detail put into these pieces and placing them on the board always gave a really fun and extra interactive quality to gameplay.

In the middle of the board is a track in which the players will move their cars along on their turn, each tile of the track falls into one of 4 categories, those being the Buy property tiles, the develop property tiles, the build a phase for free tile, and the one free entrance tile. This leads into the mechanic of the hotel entrances. These can be purchased and placed in any tile within your hotel's boundary, when a player's car stops in one of these tiles, they then owe you a fee determined by how many nights they stay at your hotel, and how developed your hotel is. With more developed hotels costing more money to stay at (Anon, n.d)(The Lucky roll 2018).

Much like Monopoly, there is money within the game that can be collected and used to buy upgrades to your property. The aim of the game is not only to buy as much property as possible, but to have the most money at the end of the game(The Lucky roll 2018). When travelling on the board track, should you land on a money tile,  you have the opportunity to buy that property. However, should another player enter that square, they have the opportunity to buy the property off of you from half the price that you would pay. That leads into the more competitive aspect of this game.

There are two dice within this game, one is a conventional D6, whereas the other is a D6 with custom decals on it of varying colours. This is the planning permission dice which is utilized once a player lands on a planning permission square, this will allow you to upgrade your hotel (Anon, n.d)(The Lucky roll 2018). The sides of the dice are as follows:

green - regular planning permission

2 - twice the planning permission

red - planning permission denied

H - Build for free

Aside from that, there isn't a lot of playing pieces within the game, most of it is reliant on rolls and strategic placement of entrances. This feature massively simplifies gameplay, making it not only quite quick to play through [on average 45 minutes] but also very simple to pick up (The Lucky roll 2018). Hotel (Milton Bradley 1986) is the version of this game that I personally have played, and I remember it was really easy to get a grasp of at a young age, I believe I was about 4 or 5 when I played this with my family. With that in mind, I think this is a great example of how to make a tycoon style game suitable for younger audiences, It minimizes the amount of playing pieces needed and at it's core, it plays pretty similarly to other family board games with no extra secondary or tertiary mechanics to its gameplay. At its core, some people describe Hotel (Milton Bradley 1986) as "Monopoly on speed"(The Lucky roll 2018) that comes from the similarities of the "moving around the board" mechanic, and the rent or in this case fee collecting mechanic. Comparing this to my own game, I think this is a slightly different genre of game to the other benchmarks I have looked at, but i really applaud Hotel (Milton Bradley 1986) for its simplicity and overall visual aesthetic. Taking inspiration from this, I hope to implement a similar quick to pick up gameplay and perhaps explore the possibility of having an upgrade system within my game. Perhaps alongside reviews, clients could reward players with money depending on how developed their Cave is. This would increase playability of the game and add in an extra level of competitiveness.

To do this, I would likely have to take inspiration from Hotel (Milton Bradley 1986) and it's title Deed cards. These are cards that contain information on how much money is earned in relation to nights stayed and the rank of the hotel. Perhaps in my game it would relate to the points achieved in certain attributes and the level of the cave which could be represented by tokens above the image of the Cave, sort of like a star system. 

For example:

Jungle Cave has a total rating of 2/3 stars

The client prioritizes Comfort and trendiness, in these stats there are a shared value of 5

The total income for this cave would be 10

Beach Cave has a total rating of 0/3 stars

The client prioritizes Warmth and Safety, in these stats there are a shared value of 2

The total income for this cave would be 2

[i would have to make a chart so the distribution of money scores would be in equal segments but this is just a rough idea to explain my thoughts]

Trello -

This post concludes my benchmark research section, I feel I've gathered a lot of inspiration from looking at these games and I hope to implement that into my own project. To do this, my next step will be general and job role/pipeline research to better understand how games are made. I am still feeling quite confident with this project despite having taken a few days off from working on it, however i will make sure to make up for the time spent away from work.

 Bibliography -

Anon, n.d. Hotel (Online). Boardgamegeek. Available at: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1502/hotel (Accessed 22 December 2025)

Anon, n.d. The Rules (Online). Hotel Board Game Fan Page. Available at: https://hotelboardgame.com/the-game/rules (Accessed 22 December 2025)

Hotel / Hotel Tycoon board game - Lucky Roll Reviews, 2018 [Youtube]. The Lucky roll. April 1. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp__t3EY2iY (Accessed 22 December 2025)