Arcane Wonders | Furnace | Board Game | Ages 14+ | 2-4 Players | 30-60 Minutes Playing Time Multicolor,AWGAW08FN

Product Information

Furnace will run for four rounds Each time running through the Auction and then the Production phase.

You want to avoid running an engine that overproduces a resource that you cannot then use for something else. When the auction ends, whoever has the highest numbered disc wins the company card and adds it to their tableau. The business cards then offer decent diversity between compensation, resource and exchange effects but the combinations begin to feel thin after a while. This means that they will take the resource shown on the top row of the card multiplied by three – if this was one coal, then they would take one coal three times.The components are decent without being amazing, and the box is perhaps a bit bigger than it should be whilst also still being small enough to fit in a rucksack or hand-luggage style case. A near-perfect design like Furnace doesn’t hardly need an expansion, but for experienced veterans, there’s a lot of fun new toys here, and I’d plan on playing with all of it more often than not. Once everyone has activated all their cards the start player passes to the next player, more cards are revealed for auction, and the process repeats. The other components are limited to cardboard coins and upgrade tokens, with wooden coal cubes, steel bars and yellow drums of oil.

You have the versatility of choosing which company to activate first, yet the restrictions of intra-company production will make you think.

Players take turns placing one of their discs on one of these cards, but you cannot place a disc on a card if a disc of the same value or colour is already present. In the simultaneous Production phase, Furnace falls into a more mundane pattern as the various factory bits come to life. The only player interaction in the game is the one during the auctions; you see what the others do, and you react accordingly.

I don't know whether Hobby World did this on purpose, yet they deserve an applause for fully subverting the theme while presenting it seriously. Each of the five available character cards offers something quite unique such as one extra disc with the value of two to use in the Auction phase, or the ability to break the Capital Disc placement rules. Honestly, if I have any one criticism, it’s that I would have liked there to have been perhaps ten to choose from – but that’s only because I like what they do to the game so much.Each of the five available character cards offers something quite unique – such as an extra disc with the value of two to use in the Auction phase, or the ability to break the Capital Disc placement rules. Each company card has one action — either production or processing — on its basic side and two actions on its upgraded side.

As it is you’ll probably burn out on it after a few plays and it will become an “every now and then” type of game. However, I also found that the variable bidding disc was the main thing that added a considerable amount of analysis paralysis, even for seasoned players, and greatly extended the game length.These cards either give you resources or allow you to convert resources into different types, like coal into oil. Chastised by my fellow gamers for a perhaps foolish spending of money, it was one of my favorite games of the year and is only very recently making it into retail distribution in the US. Furnace is an engine building game from the same designer that created one of my favorites, Smartphone Inc.