My Father's Work

My Father's Work is, without exaggeration, the only app-driven game I felt was worth buying; I only own Destinies because it was a gift, and I am not much of a fan. The production here is impressive, almost aggressively lavish—overproduced to the point of absurdity. On the table it looks like a big, weighty thematic event, promising that you are about to step into something genuinely special.

At its core, it is a thematic worker-placement game with resource management, unfolding across generations while the app constantly accompanies you with text, choices, and story. There is a lot to do, a lot of material to take in, and a sense of fullness that can easily turn into wordiness. Our game lasted around three and a half hours, so that weight does not go unnoticed.

Interaction with the scenario rests on branching paths and on decisions that continue to matter from one generation to the next. But that is also where the problem that reminded me of Destinies appears: anyone who already knows what is going on in the scenario, even without having seen every branch, has an advantage over everyone else. It is not insurmountable, but when you have to make lucky guesses between generations, scenario knowledge starts to matter more than I would like.

The app serves up fluff and background without mercy, but to me it felt more like beads for natives than a tightly integrated system that makes me say, “wow, what a thing this guy made.” I would take the approach of Dead Reckoning, with its cards and booklet, a hundred times over this constant digital narration. Maybe the second box we played, or the choices we made, was to blame; still, the story ended up so murky that we understood almost nothing, while the finale was flat and without surprises.

I will give it another chance, perhaps with a more casual group and lower expectations. But the hard truth is that I was disappointed: I expected an ambitious, cohesive thematic journey and got an expensive, beautiful construction that, on my first encounter, failed to justify all the noise around it.