Phoenix New Horizon

Phoenix New Horizon is a somewhat kinky worker-placement euro: you build up your industry, construct an engine, and do the necessary resource counting and burning to keep it running. It did not blow me away, but I did not have a bad time with it either.

At its core, the game has you place workers and use actions that open the way for your engine to grow. It has the familiar euro feel of arranging production, bonuses, and resources while trying to build a machine that pays off more and more effectively.

Interaction is a little higher than the genre average, thanks to a touch of area majority and an odd rewards/bonus-actions track. Those elements give you a reason to watch what everyone else is doing rather than staring only at your own board. Still, the turn-order mechanism rubbed me the wrong way, and that irritation felt stronger when we played with four.

It has been a little while since I played it, so I will not frame that bit of friction as a disaster. I remember it as a decent, functional euro with a few livelier ideas—just not an exceptional or memorable one.