The Manhattan Project: Energy Empire

Need to play it again

Kickstarted - Available [-]October[/-] November 2016

NIS

A worker placement game about generating energy efficiently (and of course scoring points) set in the same universe, and with very similar mechanics to, the Manhattan Project, yet a different design team, and different enough to easily stand on its own merit.

Each player has their own player board with the focus being an air, forest, water environment divided into a grid, and they start with 3 workers and some energy. On a players turn they place on one of 13 different action spaces, with 2 twists, both of which will be familiar if you’ve played Manhattan Project: 1) you can place on occupied spaces (even if you’ve placed there before), but you must have a “higher stack” with a stack consisting of a single worker and multiple energy tokens, and 2) if you choose to build a building card, you can activate (use a worker and an energy) on as many buildings you own of that type (provided you have the workers and energy) OR you can trigger your nation card (each player started with a nation with thematic starting resources) which moves you up the United Nations track (good for end game points); this means your turns and therefore the pace of the game, can be quickly sped up potentially.

The different actions, in general, are: 1) buy personal building cards (these come in three different varieties, commerce (money focused), industry (resource focused), and research (environment focused); buildings are a significant way to score endgame points and many of them require you to place a pollution token on your player board (these diminish scoring opportunities both in game and end game as you are rewarded for the more clean your environment is), 2) acquire energy dice- these are worth endgame points but more importantly generate energy for you each round (and potentially pollution if you buy cheaper, dirty energy source dice), 3) acquire raw resources (there are spaces for money, science, plastic, and steel), 4) a mish mash of other options, you can convert resources, get more workers etc. Again there are 13 spaces!

When you run out of workers, you have to take a refresh turn where you pick up workers from the board (again similar to manhattan project) and you roll your energy dice (if you have them) and this is where a pollution token is removed from the round counters; there are 6 round counters, each with a small stack of pollution markers on them. When a stack runs out, an event is triggered (each event awards points for a particular row of your environment, and the first half of the cards give a positive effect, whereas the second half of events give a negative effect). When the last event is triggered the game ends.

The game plays relatively easy and smooth, it’s thematic and it scales well.

Own the [boardgame=267743]Cold War[/boardgame] expansion.

I really enjoy this game. It mixes a plethora of mechanisms like worker placement and engine building

$30

This is a good game, but I just get bored by it. It ran a lot longer than expected and while the game works mechanically, I for some reason was never terribly excited about the choices I was making. I normally love tableau-building and worker placement, but perhaps because of the theme or because of the relatively repetitive gameplay, this one just fell flat for me. I can completely understand why someone else would enjoy the game, a it has a number of good qualities, but it makes me long for more exciting tableau-building games, many of which are also significantly shorter. Played twice and don't anticipate agreeing to play it again soon.

1 play / 3 players

LIKE: Tense game, because there isn't much time to build your engine before the game is over. Love the dice for power, can I just roll these all day? I also enjoy the roundless aspect, because some planning can be calculated to play that to your advantage.

DISLIKE: Not as much focus on the engine as there is in obtaining points as a means to an end. The scoring bonuses are revealed randomly which can occasionally be swingy.

OVERALL: Solid game, but the engine building isn't as satisfying as I had hoped. More plays needed.