Factory 42

After the Grey Emminence fiasco, and the designer’s refusal to admit he had shot his own game in the foot, buying one of his games always carries some risk. This one won me over instantly with its theme, though: an ambitious worker-placement game in the Soviet Underdark, where dwarves work without rest on government orders while quietly scraping together a few VPs by making illegal goods for elven capitalists. The chance to troll Marxist friends alone was enough to get it off the shop shelf and assimilated into the hoard.

At its core, Factory 42 is a very good, thinky, competitive worker-placement game. I can send my pieces out either as workers, to perform actions, or as commissars, who do not take actions themselves but alter how a location works. That dual use makes worker placement more than simply claiming a space: I am considering not only what I want to gain, but also how I can bend or rearrange everyone else’s options.

Each round, the workers sent by all players to redeem coupons create a shared pool of materials. Those materials are dropped into the “Tower of Bureaucracy,” a dice tower that retains some of them inside, so what is available is never guaranteed. They are then loaded onto railcars and sent to the players’ private factories, where production happens. This part is excellent: one player loads railcars, another sends them away, and the interdependence creates an honest mess, plenty of brain-burn, and a good deal of hatred.

Unfortunately, just when the game should let me enjoy that production engine, its physical production exhausts me. There are twelve materials represented by badly painted cubes, which must be matched to badly printed cards; five grown men spent ten minutes trying to work out what was needed to make hinges. Fail. We stopped halfway through, not because the game was bad, but because the hassle had drained us. Even so, I want to remake the production cards as a reference aid with letters instead of symbols and play it properly to completion, because otherwise the experience ticks all the right boxes. Thankfully, we had something classic planned for the end of the evening, with a twist of lemon.