Two Rex Plays #18 - Fantastic Factories
In this edition of Two Rex Plays we’re discussing Fantastic Factories, a worker placement, engine building game designed and illustrated by Joseph Chen and Justin Faulkner. At the start of each turn, chose between buying a blueprint or hiring a specialist contractor, then role your worker dice to determine what resources you’ll have at your disposal. Those resources are then used to construct the blueprints and build out your industrial empire or use existing factories to manufacture goods.
Here are the design features we enjoyed:
Distinct routes to victory – The game finishes when a certain number of buildings are constructed or goods manufactured, creating two distinctive routes to victory. Focus on creating an end-to-end manufacturing cycle or concentrate on cumulating the raw resources needed to fulfil blueprints (which include vanity monuments whose only purpose is to score end-game points). Both routes seemed equally viable on our play throughs.
Engine building – The engine building in Fantastic Factories focuses on expanding the options available to you so that each worker can be used to efficiently create the resources you need to manufacture goods (or construct more buildings). Whilst there are some cards that allow you to have more workers on a temporary basis, the emphasis is on efficiency rather than expansion.
Cascading effects – When you get your engine working efficiently it creates a satisfying chain effect where the workers generate a significant pool of resources that you direct towards your chosen end-goal.
Powerful Contractors – At the start of each round you choose between a blueprint and a contractor who will provide a one-off benefit. This is a difficult choice – blueprints are key to many aspects of the game so passing up an opportunity to pick one up from the sighted selection (rather than blind drawn) feels costly. Fortunately, this is balanced out by the strength of the contractor cards which feel much more powerful than you’d usually expect from instant effect cards.
Simple scoring – The end-game scoring system is relatively simple, requiring you to count the number of goods and buildings you’ve created. Not having to break out a calculator to determine the winner reduces the in-game admin and makes it easier to keep track of who is winning and losing as the game progresses. Fantastic Factories is a relatively long game (the box suggests this is 45-60 minutes) but this scoring mechanism would be a particularly good fit for quicker games where it would match the speed of the experience.
We’re particularly interested in the engine building aspect of Factory Factories as this is an important aspect of one of our games. Of the two relevant elements highlighted above, we’d already consciously built-in efficiency benefits, but the cascading effect is something that we don’t really have.
Interested in Fantastic Factories? Find out more here:
Playthrough video
https://fantasticfactories.com/
Board Game geek Page
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/216600/fantastic-factories
Kickstarter page for expansion packs
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deepwatergames/fantastic-factories-manufactions/