HELL NO it's not worth $256.  Its rating on BoardGameGeek is pretty low, too. 

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6552

Here's some more discussion about the price from BGG:  http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/104828  The best comment on that thread is this:  "I can say that this game made me money! I bought it for $3 at a thrift store and sold it for $150 on ebay Cashflow has my vote."

If you want a good economy/money  based game you should probably try out Power Grid: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2651

With all we know about Robert Kiyosaki's personal history and his half-baked financial prescriptions, why do financial writers still take him seriously?

Well. If I could turn $250 in profit selling a board game to well-meaning folks at various levels of financial desperation, I could be rich too.

Caveat emptor.

If you want a board game to teach you basic economics, try Power Grid or Puerto Rico.

What do you mean by Puerto RIco?

I played it twice or so with a group of people who got together for that very reason. At the time there were several of these groups. Everyone would chip in $5 to play the game. That help offset the original costs.

It's not *just* like Monopoly. As you said, it's more realistic. And when I played it, comparisons to Monopoly were far from my mind. It really takes the essence of "financial getting-ahead" and shows you the skeleton of what it really takes to get where you want. Once you start seeing your own finances like that...it's easier to deal with them in terms of just numbers - makes it easier to manipulate when you can do that without your own psychological, social and other factors getting in the way.

It's just like what some people do with "practice stock trading" perhaps - they do it on paper before doing it for real. Takes the emotion out of it.

Get a library card

Read all the books, learn the theory of all the maths behind it! Save your self the hassle of playing the board game and start a business! Don't buy into a rich person who made there money by teaching people how they got rich! The Theory of the books is correct!

for posting the link to the review of the Rich Dad author. I was suspicious about the RDPD author, but the info on the Web site gives the specifics. Thank you!

I hate to say this, but dude I think you have just been conned into purchasing an expensive version of "Life." lol.

I bought the game in around 2000/2001. I played it bunches of times. It is interesting and I have other things to say about it too: A) I bought it for $216 if I remember correctly, so it looks like he's raised the price; B) After "drinking the Kool-Aid" for over a year, I found the johntreed.com website and I came to think, after pondering on it more, that Kiyosaki is a fraud.

It might be OK, though, that Kiyosaki's a fraud because he gives NO ADVICE, all his stuff is like a vague "American Dream" pep talk. He just sprinkles it with accounting speak and corporation stuff and you think it's a new story with new advice. This motivational aspect is why he was able to get in good with Amway. If I understand correctly, he only started selling big because Amway people all started buying his book. (In fact, now that I think about it, I wonder if Kiyosaki's book was declared a "tool" - which is how the Amway bigshots make money (they sell motivational materials)).

Anyhow, it's amazing - if you really look at what he says, or listen to his recordings, he says almost nothing. The man is inarticulate, though he has a decent patter down. He even admits to being inarticulate - dig up some of his .mp3s and you'll hear him admit to it. He mouthes classic motivational-type lines.

For some of his books he is smart enough to bring on people with more credibility than him - the CPAs and whatnot that he co-authors books with. This might also be a liability-prevention measure, I don't know. He does give some good advice, one of which is that people should go to a therapist to keep their heads clear. In my experience the most successful people I have met have all been good models of sane, responsible adulthood. Unfortunately most of us need a therapist to develop equanimity and clearheadedness in life. That advice alone could be worth the rest of what he says. And, if you follow it, ironically, you will be more likely to discover that Kiyosaki is no genius.

About Cashflow, the board game: it is entirely real-estate oriented. It is clear that Kiyosaki doesn't like entrepreneurialism because every card in the game that is associated with starting a business says things like "it takes up 14 hours per day" and then when you look at the cashflow the business generates you see that it sucks - you can never get out of the rat race that way. This is just plain not true in the real world though. If you want hard facts read "The Millionnaire Next Door" to see who the *real millionnaires are in the USA. Of course if you look at the admittedly fake Rich Dad you see that he has "boring businesses" that kick off cash flow. Kinda funny how Kiyosaki - and the game itself - kick you in the other direction.

Back to the game: If you figure out which houses in the game are worth buying and then you just buy them, you will get out of the rat race. It's fairly simple though it can require patience. I imagine that readers here who actually own real estate will probably laugh at this simple picture.

The Profit & Loss statement work is very useful to the average person who just does not "know their numbers." If you were a CPA or whatever then it would probably be almost a complete waste of time. Good entrepreneurs and sales people "know their numbers" as a matter of course, too - the game should have little to teach them.

I remember the first time I played the game. We went around the rat race a bunch of times. I got impatient to "do something"! And, so I bought a bum house. It had negative cash flow. What did I know? I didn't know cash flow from a hole in the ground. I can remember realizing how stupid the purchase was later. None of my tablemates would buy the house off me. LOL Good for them. I started to think more about impatience and "wanting to get started" when I didn't know what I was doing. That was a valuable lesson. It's not like playing the game by itself has made the tendency go away - but it is helpful to have realized this - and the game definitely did that.

If you read and absorb Kiyosaki you will start thinking that there are deals around every corner. You start looking at things differently. It's good - but also could be quite dangerous. Good investors look at an enormous number of deals before they buy something. Amateurs get excited to buy something, anything, and blow it on their first shot. They don't get that yes, the market is full of things to buy, but that you have to know how to evaluate those things and have to walk from the vast majority of them. Kiyosaki can get you excited, make you think it's easy, that the only thing you are missing is the right attitude. Yeah right - sure - piece of cake.

I bought three or four of his books and read them carefully. The idea behind "Cashflow Quadrant" is not bad - he gives you a simple structure to look at jobs and work in the world and then analyze where you fit. It can be quite thought-provoking. Most people do just follow a certain type of life with respect to money.

But on top of all this, John T. Reed says, on his site, that Kiyosaki's book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad contains much wrong advice, much bad advice, some dangerous advice, and virtually no good advice." I decided I'd take Reed at his word (I've never bought anything from Reed, by the way, nor do I have any connection with him.) Luckily for Kiyosaki he gives almost no concrete advice, because Reed points out how if you literally follow what he seems to indicate you should do you might actually be breaking the law. It is interesting to note that the few people who have tried to track down Kiyosaki's investments have come up with a house in Phoenix worth, if I remember correctly, less than 3/4 of a million. And it was bought fairly recently. Anyhow, buys like that are public information - so he didn't even use a corporation or whatever to buy his house - though on his recordings he talks about all these great advantages to incorporating (like, he says, tax breaks on "board meetings" which he seems to think should be held in Hawaii or the Bahamas or wherever).

So, it seems clear that Kiyosaki has made his money selling people like me his products. I doubt he owns much otherwise and I think his talk of being an international businessman who makes deals is puffery.

His comments on the uselessness of much higher education are more poignant now that the employment market has tanked. And considering the enormous debts an entire generation of kids in the US have undertaken to become college grads so they can get those "good jobs" it is indeed a sad picture. But his damning of education is very shortsighted - and should be criticized harshly - because he doesn't point out the obvious: people need a discipline, something that others will pay them for, if they ever want to work for someone. As a practical matter most people will work for someone else most of their life. And when it comes time to hire, I'd hire the college grad with the debt over Kiyosaki anyday. They showed they could stick it out through college. They also, if they have brains, have some sort of mental discipline which they can use to analyze problems.

Remember, "In life, those who can, do, those who can't, teach."

Thank you so much i am really glad to read this thank you.
i really like this and this is very use full for me.
thank you again.

The thing you have to remember is that this is merely a board game, and although you might learn a few things from it, it really doesn't instill any great habits from playing it. It might improve your math or problem solving, but to make you a better investor or entrepreneur I find very unlikely.

I played the PC version, and I did have fun with the game, but I got over it quickly after beating it once, and it was really nothing new compared to his book 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' mainly because I played it right after I read the book.

That and as it is being a game, it is too complex to be enjoyable. Games are suppose to be entertaining, and if they teach, then they do so without you knowing. I believe there is a lot more value in Monopoly because it teaches you to work with the amount of my money you have, and to make wise investments. And even has the chances that an unexpected expense occurs.

I believe you're better picking up Monopoly for the PC, that way you can play against the computer and really work your brain. As for Cashflow, I wouldn't recommend it, I'd rather buy a Digital Camera and capture memories.

We actually enjoy playing the game a whole lot, as has everyone we've shared it with. As a game, it's quite good.

(And, I've played it with kids I used to tutor in math so it's not too complicated to be a game.)

Debbie M wrote: "First, the game is extremely biased. You cannot make more money by getting a higher paying job or reducing your expenses, for example."

That's partly true, but that's the point of the game. The game absolutely connects lowering expenses to getting ahead, but the point is that a higher paying job sucks you further into the rat race and tends to make your expenses higher. The game wants you to internalize that low income/low expenses is a more flexible starting position. Whether or not you believe that message is one thing, but that's the game's message and I think it does a good job of promoting that message.

While Kiyosaki may have been discredited himself, some of the basic advice (not thinking of your house as an asset, generating "passive" income, building a business not just creating a job for yourself as a self-employed person) really changed the way we saw our financial situation.

Granted, I'm sure a lot of that had to do with the fact that his books were #1 best sellers right at the time we started to get serious about entrepreneurship/personal finance. His were "the" books to read at the time, and there was good advice to be found in them. We also were influenced heavily by "Your Money or Your Life" and "Free Parking" so we were getting a lot of good ideas right around the same time. (If you're put off by Kiyosaki himself, do check out those other 2 books. They're older, but they're great.)

"It also promises to change the way you think about money forever, which will ultimately get you out of the rat race and into a life of financial freedom."

It sounds so corny, but this is exactly the experience we had, as a culmination of the variety of personal finance books we'd read, our decision to move to the middle of nowhere and buy a house for less than my parents spent on their minivan. It's true that it's difficult for money to be totally passive, but having bought enough rental properties (again, in cheapie-land, but where most people rent houses instead of apartments) to justify paying a property manager, we're well on our way to the income being quite passive.

I do credit the game for giving us a particular "a ha!" moment, but we had also already planned a crazy lifestyle change, so we weren't in "this is just a game and it won't ever work in real life" mode to begin with. We were playing the game with the intention of living it, and that's pretty much what happened. Had we not been already primed to change our lifestyle, then it probably would have felt just like playing Monopoly. (Although, I find this game much more fun than Monopoly.)

Certainly it's not worth the cost for everyone (and you don't even want to know what it sold for in Canada at its prime!) but if you get a chance to play someone else's, I'd take it.

I bought this game because I saw it mentioned in 3 different sources that I trusted (none of which were RDPD or Kiyosaki related) and credit it with one of my three "ah-ha!" moments in my financial life.

I had played it with friends 3-4 times, and I could never get ahead. I couldn't figure out why things would work out for them, and not for me. Eventually, I learned that I had to look at more than what I was just buying, I needed to look at the value, and to have money set aside to take advantage of deals when I see them happen. And it's worked out wonderfully over the last 3 years.

Granted, I'm the only one I know who has had such an experience, but I'll just add my cents to the pile.