In this mid-weight game you are building up your tableau with different factories and buildings to gain points and open opportunities for new actions.
Overview of Board Game
It’s an arms production race! Compete against other players as, in the shortest time, you strive to create the most powerful set of factories. In order to achieve industrial supremacy, you must carefully manage your blueprints, train your employees, and produce as many products as possible!
BGG Metrics
- Weight: 2.22/5
- Score: 7.5/10
- Best Player Counts: 3
Designer
Joseph Z Chen, Justin Faulkner
Game Mechanism
- Worker Placement with Dice as Workers
- Set Collection
- Hand Management
- Card Drafting
Theme
- Build your best Factory using factory upgrade cards
- Hire workers and specialists for one time bonus actions, dice manipulation and resources
- Art is bright and consistent, however after numerous plays the game does become a numerical optimization puzzle, with less interest paid to what type of building is being used vs the theme/name/action of said buidling
Goal
Have the most VP at the end of the game. Points are earned via resources created during the game, and via points listed on tableau building cards.
Components
- 28 dice (16mm) (4 red, 4 blue, 4 green, 4 yellow, 4 purple, and 8 white)
- 50 energy resource tokens
- 30 metal* resource tokens (*clarification: represents metal resources in the game but made out of chipboard)
- 85 goods tokens
- 4 tool label tokens
- 78 blueprint cards
- 18 contractor cards
- 1 first player token
- 5 player boards and player aids
Variability
From a replayability standpoint Fantastic Factories includes 30 unique blueprint cards and 17 contractor cards to provide ample variety for many games.
As the cards work as both a form of payment to hire contractors and to build factories, hand management is important and can vary your game greatly. There are a base set of actions on your player board though a significant amount of your actions come from the factories you choose to build. Therefore, your game can change based on the cards that come up, as well as, how you choose to use them.
Board Game Replayability Review
8 / 10 (Goes the Distance)
- Based on 25 plays
- Great box insert makes set-up and tear down under 5 mins, increasing times it hits the table
- Simultaneous actions makes games go quickly
- Scales well from 1 – 4 players
With the additional randomization of the game through dice rolls we believe that this game has a great deal of potential play. With a combination of solo and two player games we believe there is a substantial amount of play in the box.
For us Fantastic Factories GOES THE DISTANCE in our collection.