Forged in Steel

Forged in Steel begins with the calm promise of a city builder: put up a town, arrange your production, find the right home for each building. Then it comes for your mines.

At heart, it is a low-luck city-building game, related in broad shape to Urban Sprawl but with less randomness and much more emphasis on where buildings go. Getting a useful building is not enough; you need to place it where it serves your own plan.

Then the other players get involved. They burn your houses, steal your factories, switch your cards, and turn every careful move into an opening for another blow. The rulebook is not the problem; everyone understands perfectly well what they can do to you. It is nastier than Cosmic Encounter, which is not a comparison I make lightly.

Oddly, the excess works. It is like a sauce with a ridiculous Scoville count: it hurts, you know it hurts, and you go back for another taste. A friend put it neatly: this is the ideal game when you want to relieve yourself in somebody else's dentures.

I come down on the positive side, with the necessary warning that you will not make friends with it. If your group laughs when a plan collapses in spectacular fashion, Forged in Steel is a wonderfully awful tool for the job.