Encyclopedia

Encyclopedia is another case of a game that lost me exactly at the finish line. Its production, at least in the KS Deluxe edition I saw, is impressive: carefully made components, fitting illustration, and a rulebook that does its job without making you solve an archaeological puzzle. Even the standard cardboard elements look perfectly respectable. Everything says care went into this — which makes it a shame that the scoring system chose to ignore it.

Players contribute to the first encyclopedia by gathering specialists, taking on commissions to study animals in their natural environments, funding expeditions, and eventually publishing their findings. At its core, the game is set collection: you build collections and, at the end, count how many things you managed to achieve in the various categories.

The game runs on a very enjoyable dice-drafting mechanism, where both a die's colour and value matter, without luck becoming the boss of the table. A round starts gently and gradually tightens up, giving decisions a pleasing sense of tension. There are just the right, satisfying doses of engine building and resource management, and the gameplay overall is enjoyable enough that I can see why I would want to come back to it. I have not played Museum, so I cannot judge whether that comparison holds, but Encyclopedia is certainly lighter than Dominations.

Then the final scoring arrives and does everything it can to sabotage all that good feeling. It rewards single-colour strategies far too heavily: they are not only dull to execute, but also awkward if the table decides to stop them. That is when kingmaking situations enter the picture, along with the logic of “cutting off my own finger to cut off someone else’s hand,” which feels completely out of place in a feel-good euro that, until then, has been feeding you points with a bulldozer. The fact that there is no cap on a collection, and that after twelve items you simply keep scoring maximum points over and over, is the cherry on top of this very odd design mistake.

I would play it again, because the journey really is enjoyable. I would do so only half-heartedly, though, knowing the same disappointment is waiting at the end. A smarter scoring matrix, with conditions for multipliers across one axis and totals down the other, in the style of What's Your Game, could have lifted Encyclopedia to another level. I cannot comment on the expansion that is available, since we did not play it; if it is supposedly meant to save the situation, the implication is probably the opposite. A huge missed opportunity, because the game had nearly everything else in place.