The Manhattan Project

Good worker placement fun theme and has some difficult decisions. Game seems to end abruptly every time we play.

My wife was very "meh" on the theme, but she gave it a shot at Dice Tower Con 2014 and I was surprised to see she bought it for me! First impression after a 5 player game was that it was a smart decision. I was always intrigued by the theme. The worker placement mechanic is unique and offers lots of interaction for a Euro. Fun times.

UPDATED 10-10-14: Bumped it to a 10.

UPDATED 7-13-16: Dropped back to a 9. I'm not sure I love it as much as I once did, but I still really, really like it.

Nations Second Stage

A very good worker placement with cool theme. In late game it has to much downtime...

Generally thematic worker placement game about building uranium and/or plutonium bombs.

It's a typical worker placement game, with the following 2 exceptions: 1) as an action, you need to recall back your workers (similar to Tournay, you don't get them back automatically, so this creates some occasional interesting decisions), and 2) you get additional extra placements on your own personal board where you will have built buildings, allowing for potential sequential multiple placements. You have options such as acquiring more workers (there are some with minor special abilities such as engineers and scientists), acquiring money (needed to build bombs, buy buildings, acquire resources such as yellowcake/uranium/plutonium), acquiring plutonium, uranium, yellowcake, acquiring bomb plans, building up your military strength, attacking other players, spying on them (using their buildings), and constructing bombs. All of the points in the game are through the construction of bombs.

The buildings are typically upgrades of all of the available actions on the board. Money is very tight and essential. Workers seem plentiful, but more is always better and you can also acquire more than your allotment by hiring temporary contract workers. You can play an arms race and be aggressive or not (games play very differently depending on the style of players involved or the synergy of the buildings that a player has). The game ends "sudden death" with the first player to meet the point scoring requirement (points are ONLY scored through bomb building, which is multi-step process). Nice artwork and very clear rulebook. A very solid first design.

Own the [boardgame=128883]Second Stage[/boardgame] and [boardgame=108421]Nations[/boardgame] expansions.