Engine building is an amorphous genre of table games where you get resources which you spend on things that will give you more resources. At some point, you'll start converting resources to whatever the game's victory conditions are, turning it into a race for the highest score. There are often a lot of additional mechanics tied into this basic framework to make the game richer and more strategic.
Due to the rather broad nature of this definition, it is difficult to define what a tool-building game is: after all, war games where you capture territory may qualify! But as the famous saying goes, engine building is something you know when you see it, especially in a group of games that put it front and center among their mechanics. And among those, there's a smaller subset of the best that we've singled out for recommendation.
Furnace
Why not start with an engine building title that involves almost literally building engines? In Furnace, you're a tycoon during the Industrial Revolution, bidding in an auction to acquire machines and businesses to add to your growing empire. The purpose of this is to either generate the basic resources of the game or take those resources and process them into higher level products with the aim of creating some kind of production line that will eventually generate money , which serves as victory points. It's an engaging setup, with the auction bringing tension and interaction that these types of games often lack, while the production line brings a new dimension to the way you build your stuff .
Century
Engine building games include some of the most complex and intense titles in strategy gaming. But the concept itself is simple, and there are some great entry-level engine games suitable for the whole family. Century: Spice Road is probably the best. Everyone starts with two cards, one that gives them basic spices and another that allows you to upgrade a spice to a more valuable spice. There are a series of cards available for purchase that allow you to perform more complex variations of these two actions, offering certain spice combinations in exchange for more valuable cards. Players are aiming to get card combinations that work together, snowballing sequences leading to more and more valuable spices at each step in the race to win valuable victory score cards most valuable. If the pseudo-historical theme isn't for you, there's one fantasy version with beautiful art.
Magnificence
Another home engine builder, Splendor casts players in the role of jewelers, attempting to create the most impressive pieces from a variety of gems. On your turn, you can pick up some cool poker chips representing different gems or use them to get jewel cards from a face-up screen. Once acquired, jewelry tokens also act as permanent gems to help you with your future purchases, and this is the fuel that powers your engine, allowing you to purchase those tokens. bigger and better which will eventually be worth victory points. It's a simple setup that helps mask the surprising feeling of anxiety as you wait to see whether you'll get the cards you want before other players, and even if those cards have value against you. with your growing engine as you hope or not. The game plays perfectly well with two people, but there is a more strategically rich two-player version called Glorious duel.
Wingspan
The million-selling Wingspan earned its place on this list thanks to the widespread appeal of its ecological bird sanctuary theme. This may seem like a strange topic for an engine-building game, but the structure is there: every time you add a bird to a habitat, that habitat's rewards are food, eggs, and bird cards, will be stronger and most birds have special powers that are activated as part of that step. So the more birds you have, the easier it is to get resources to play more birds. Purists may see that the game ends as soon as the engine you're building is complex enough to be interesting, and it's true that part of the heart of your strategy is racing to be first. according to each round's scoring criteria, but you can't argue with the beautiful art, variety, and millions of copies sold.
Res Arcana
Res Arcana is a bizarre game that feels like it just doesn't work. Players, representing wizards racing to gain magical power, are dealt or randomly selected cards depicting random spells, minions, and artifacts. Many of them give you access to additional resources to play more cards or as the game progresses you gain some victory points. There was no way such a haphazard collection of cards could combine well enough to create an engine, and yet, they did. Your responsibility is to try to find the best combination of your collection of magical minions to put you ahead in the race for magical power. It's never less than an engaging puzzle, as the race enters its final stages it becomes surprisingly fun with loads of extra power-ups including limited player interaction.
obsolete
No matter how complex the engine builders are, they all work on the same basic principle of using resources to buy things that help you get more resources. But Anachrony has a really fresh theme: in a sci-fi setting with time travel, what if you could borrow those resources from your future self? Doing so will allow you to stay ahead of your competitors as you prepare to escape a global disaster but fail to pay them back in time and you will incur unsustainable penalties. The game builds a rigorous framework around this concept, challenging you to recruit workers and score points from a variety of sources as you research and build futuristic technologies to power your tools. its game.
Underwater city
Another sci-fi movie that uses engines, Underwater City asks you to build underwater cities in the near future. There's a new color matching mechanic whereby you can send your worker to any space to take an action there, but if that space is the same color as the card you use to take the action , then you also get card effects. This forces you to work with the cards you've been dealt, effectively prioritizing to try to gain an edge over the competition. This engine is based around industrial plants that you can build around your growing cities, initiating production at various points in the game, fueling your undersea colonization efforts first. opponents using the game's rich and satisfying palette of strategy options.
It's a wonderful world
The wonderful world you will build is not a pleasant winter story but a near-future Earth where you are ruling a new state. Your raw material is the draft of cards from which you will select likely candidates to put into your engine to generate resources and points. Some you will start building, others you can recycle for the resources they will consume, but you will need a plan because the process happens in stages, each stage generating a specific type of resource, as long as you have a building that produces it. This combination of draft and phased builds packs a lot of fun into relatively few rules, especially with a large pool of cards that you can find synergies with along the way. Build a strong, satisfied nation.
Race for the galaxy
This perennially popular science fiction card game is an early example of a “follow” mechanic, in which each player chooses a type of action and everyone takes that action, in case This is a small reward for players to choose. Initially, you'll mainly be playing alien worlds and technology upgrades, which are the starting fuel for the engine you'll develop throughout the game. Unusually, the cards themselves are important resources that you pay to use other cards, although some of your worlds will also produce goods to feed the growing machine your. There's a lot of complex coordination to manage between the tableau you're building and the stages you're selecting, ensuring you'll stay engrossed in a highly varied strategy mode until the empire engines come out. Your identity creates technology and stabilizes the world to a satisfying degree.
Carpet
While there are other games on this list that carry a civilizational theme, Tapestry is the only one that truly evokes that story in any detail. You will perform actions each turn that, in addition to providing resources typical of engine-building games, can provide you with exploration tiles to build maps, city pieces, and other Military units that you can fight on the map. Your motivation is based on exploration. The other appeal of Tapestry is the incredible variety of different ways you can build your stuff, with different civilizations providing different starting points, which unfold through the The iconic “tapestry” cards and rewards you can receive through climbing the four advancement paths, ensure every game delivers its trademark new challenges to explore.
For more, see our roundup of the best 4-player board gameand if you're looking for a bargain, take a look best cheap board games rounding.
Matt Thrower is a freelance board and video game writer for IGN. (Boards, videos, all kinds of games!)
