Manager Board Game 1st edition

Manager became the most successful Monopoly-like made in the former Soviet Union. It initially presented itself as scientific and rational in its promise of capitalist success and box art featuring punched tape, then a symbol of the technological cutting-edge of data storage. Valerii Pankratov published Manager in Leningrad, in 1988, founding the corporation "Petropan" to promote and market it. Manager advertised with an unprecedented television commercial and was covered by the Soviet media with some small degree of controversy for its vision of privatization overtaking the Soviet planned economy. It consequently became a national best-seller and continued to be made for decades to come, including a nostalgic re-release of the first edition box in 2020. However, during the Perestroika, Manager's appearance heralded a wave of similarly unlicensed Monopoly-likes. Virtually every major city in the USSR had a cooperative publishing its own variant, all of them offering children and adults a new understanding of the capitalist economy through play. Manager was initially heralded as prophetic for imagining and representing the looming privatization economy in 1988, but in hindsight, it is unclear if its success was based on the genuine ability to explain something about the new era, or just in offering the fantasy of informed control and mastery. The vast proliferation of Manager-likes throughout the Soviet and Post-Soviet world testifies to the urgency with which the public sought this reassurance.