Obsession

Obsession was one of those boxes I had wanted to open for ages, and my first encounter had the faint awkwardness of a guest who has not been told which drawing room is safe. Its faux-Victorian dressing is everywhere — in the components, the rulebook, the language of the game — and it has real character, but readability is sacrificed almost immediately. The player aid is genuinely inadequate, and the iconography too often asks to be decoded rather than glanced at. A shame, because the game itself has the pleasing heft and presence of a proper thing on a table.

Each player runs a manor house, competing for status in local society by staging events that make the opposition look distinctly second-rate. You manage guests and servants to put those events on, earn money, and turn it into better rooms; those rooms then support more ambitious occasions and more distinguished guests.

It is mostly multiplayer solitaire: the other players provide a benchmark and pressure in the race for prestige, rather than people who regularly pull your plans apart. In the base game, the resource-management and worker-placement system is tight, thematic and works very well; the sort of neat, satisfying organisation that can leave you content after a Tuesday at work.

The short game in its plain form appealed to me a good deal. The longer game, with promo tiles and the additional Upstairs, Downstairs staff, felt more verbose, less taut, and noticeably more dependent on what happened to arrive; the expansions' already awkward iconography only becomes more irritating there. I would play it again in the right circumstances, but I would not recommend buying it with all this material; the base box on its own, perhaps.