Furnace

I had been watching Furnace for some time. Forty-five to sixty minutes is often an awkward length: neither filler nor a properly substantial game. But auctions and production are exactly the sort of economic machinery I want on the table, and Furnace gets four honest rounds out of them without feeling like a reduced version of something larger.

Each round has players bidding on cards from a shared pool, then gradually building personal production chains to generate the most money by the end. The auction is the real system here: quick, strategically rich, and mercifully free of the endless bid-or-pass loops that can make this genre drag.

Its best idea is compensation for the losers. Fail to win a card and you receive something for the attempt — often more than the winner — so the interesting decision is whether to pursue the card or deliberately lose in precisely the right place. The production step that follows is a neat optimisation puzzle, though the repeated shifting of cards is fiddly and assumes players can manage their own chains; I prefer the hard variant, where cards cannot change position, because it keeps production moving and puts the emphasis where it belongs: the auction.

This deserves a place in a collection: comfortable, replayable, and appreciably deeper than its running time suggests. The capitalist cards add asymmetry, but some appear excessively strong with three players; they work better with four. The playmat adds nothing of consequence.

Updated session

Later plays without the promo cards brought Furnace's strengths into much sharper focus and removed the sour aftertaste left by earlier sessions. The difference appears to be those cards themselves: the GenCon Promo can potentially yield 16 points per phase, which puts it above the curve, and the game is better with no promos in the deck.