Factory 42

After the Grey Emminence fiasco, buying another game from this designer carries a certain gambling element. The setting won me over anyway: a Soviet Underdark where dwarves fulfil state orders while quietly making illegal goods for elven capitalists and their victory points. It is such an enthusiastically silly premise that the box went straight into my hoard.

This is worker placement with actual pressure behind it. Your pieces can serve as workers, taking actions, or as commissars, changing how the action spaces operate. Commissars produce nothing themselves, which may be a touch too thematic.

Workers cash in coupons to build a shared pool of materials, which is then dropped into the Bureaucracy Tower; the tower retains some pieces each time, so what is available is never certain. Materials are then loaded onto wagons and sent to private factories for production, while one player loads and another dispatches: proper confusion, real strain, and a healthy amount of table hatred.

Then the production quality sets about exhausting the game it has just built. There are twelve materials represented by badly painted cubes, matched against poorly printed cards, until five adults are spending ten minutes working out what a hinge requires. We did not finish it; not because Factory 42 is bad, but because its physical implementation is needlessly punishing. Beneath that indefensible usability sits a very good game I want to revisit, once I have made a lettered play aid to replace the useless symbols.