My Father's Work

My Father's Work is the only app-driven game I have bought on purpose, which says something about the promise it made. The production is striking, almost aggressively lavish. It is overproduced to the point of nausea: a game determined to look substantial on the table, whether or not it has earned the effect.

At its centre, this is thematic worker placement and resource management. You gather and spend resources, place workers, and try to assemble a plan across a game that stretches through generations. There is a great deal to do, perhaps too much; the gameplay is filling, but it can also talk for far too long.

The app delivers the scenario, its background, and its branching paths, while your choices are meant to steer the story. That is where the trouble begins. If you know what a scenario contains, you hold an advantage over the other players even without having seen every branch. It is not insurmountable, but when the game asks for lucky guesses between generations, prior scenario knowledge becomes an awkward edge rather than an organic part of play.

Our game, using the second box, ran to roughly three and a half hours, produced a story we never properly understood, and ended with very little pulse or surprise. The app dispenses fluff and lore without mercy, yet it feels more like beads offered to natives than a joined-up system that makes you admire the construction. Dead Reckoning's cards and booklet handle that sense of discovery far more cleanly.

I will play it again, perhaps with a more casual group and the hope that this particular scenario, or our choices within it, did it a disservice. But the plain truth is that My Father's Work disappointed me: so ambitious, so burdened with stuff, and far less coherent than it wants to appear.