Venture (2nd Edition, Standard Size Butterbox)

Venture is played with two decks of cards. The first deck is the "Corporation" deck and contains cards from each of six different industries (Aerospace, Automotive, Chemical, Electronics, Petroleum and Steel). Each card contains from one to five letters (from the range A-F) and a value from 8-24 million (varying depending on the number of letters). The second deck is the "Resource" deck and contains Capital, Proxy Fight and Profit Cards.

At the start of the game five corporations are placed face up in the center of the table. Each player is given seven Resource cards. Each player in turn may purchase Corporations from the center of the table using Capital cards.

If a player has two or more corporations from different industries that have at least one letter in common, they may be combined to form a "Conglomerate". As many corporations as desired can be placed into one Conglomerate as long as they are all from different industries and have at least one letter in common.

A player can use a Proxy Fight card to purchase a Corporation belonging to another player. Only the top card in a Conglomerate can be taken over this way.

When a player has made all of the purchases he wishes to, he replaces any purchased Corporations from the center of the table with new cards from the Corporation deck and draws two new cards from the Resource deck. Play then passes to the next player.

Whenever a Profit card is turned up, a scoring round occurs. Points are scored based on the number of Corporations in a Conglomerate and the number of letters in common with all of the cards in the Conglomerate. When the last Corporation has been purchased a final scoring round is performed. The points from all of the scoring rounds are totaled and the player with the highest total is the winner. (As the rules put it, "The others are simply multi-millionaires").