Fantastic Factories

8th February 2022

Tuesday night games with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns continued with Fantastic Factories.

I don't know if factories are fantastic but I guess we're going to find out.

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What's in a game?

• Player board: These rectangular boards contain recessed spaces to assign 3 rows of up to 3 dice each and considered each player's headquarters.
  Research: This is the first row, dice of any value can be assigned here.
  Generate: Dice showing values 1-3 can be assigned here.
  Mine: Finally, dice displaying 4-6 can be assigned here.
• ​Dice: Fantastic Factories comes with quite a few dice. They're normal six-siders constructed of translucent acrylic with rounded corners and dots.
  There are 5 sets of 4 dice in player colours and a generic set of 8 grey-white dice which players can acquire temporarily.
• Tokens: The game makes use of various types of card tokens.
  Energy tokens: These round tokens are unsurprisingly marked with lightning bolts.
  Metal tokens: Metal bars are used to indicate these are metal tokens
  Goods tokens: There are 2 types of these token that show 1 or 2 crates and correspondingly represent 1 or 2 goods.
  Tool type tokens: There is 1 each of these 4 tokens and they show a cog, wrench, hammer and shovel. They are used to determine the type of tool required to hire contractors (See below for more on contractors.). Tool type symbols also appear on blueprint cards.
• Cards: There are 2 types of cards in Fantastic Factories.
  Blueprints: These are the factories that players will build.
  In the top left it lists the cost to build the factory, this will include some combination of energy and metal as well as a tool. Additionally, when a blueprint is discarded, it will generate that tool type.
  In the top right corner it shows the VPs the card is worth when built. 
  Finally, in the bottom half, the card shows what kind of ability that blueprint will have when built, e.g, spending energy to get goods or something along those lines.
  ​Contractors: These cards have once-only abilities that are triggered when the card is bought (Contractor is hired.). Hiring contractors will cost a tool, the exact type of tool is determined by the tool type tokens.
• First player marker: The game features a wooden first player token shaped like a factory, it even has a pair of polluting smokestacks!

The components in Fantastic Factories are average in quality, which means they're perfectly acceptable, there's nothing poor here. Having said that, the translucent dice look good despite not being wooden, speaking of which, the wooden first player marker is a nice touch.

From an art perspective, the game makes good use of cheerfully bright colours. The art itself uses heavily stylised illustrations of both factories and contractors which is fine and suits the game's slightly light-hearted theme.

When built, factories provide a varied amount of special actions, consequently the game makes use of quite a varied amount of iconography. For the most part it's straightforward, however, on occasion 2 cards may seem similar but they'll be a small difference between denominated by a single small icon or sometimes they'll just be something 
​I wouldn't say it's any kind of a gamebreaker or that there's too much iconography but for a few turns players will probably end up referring to the rules.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Tool tokens: Put out the 4 tool tokens in a line, the order does not matter.
• Contractors: Shuffle the contractor cards into a face-down deck, then deal 4 face-up with each one in line beneath each tool token.
• Blueprints: Also shuffle these into a face-down deck and again, deal 4 face-up, this time below the contractor cards.
  Marketplace: Thus this row of 4 tokens with 2 rows of 4 cards beneath also forms 4 columns and is what is called the marketplace.
• Players: Give each player a player board, 4 dice in their player colour, 2 energy and 1 metal token.
  Finally, deal 4 blueprint cards to each player.

On to play
Broadly speaking, a round is broken into 2 phases; a market phase which occurs in turn order and a work phase, which can be performed simultaneously by all players.

• Market phase: Starting with the first player and going in turn order, everyone may perform the optional action, then must choose one of the following 2 actions.
  • Optional action: By spending an energy or metal token, the active player may wipe one of the two rows of cards in the marketplace and have 4 new cards revealed.
  • Hire contractor: The active player may hire 1 contractor card by paying it's cost which will a combination of whatever energy/metal tokens it may require plus the tool symbol for the column it's in, the active player does this by discarding a card from their hand with a matching tool symbol.
    When a contractor is acquired, it's ability is used immediately and the card is discarded.
    That's not very realistic, if it was, the contractor would do nothing for 3 rounds and then charge the player again before doing anything!
    OR
  • Gain blueprint: The active player may buy a blueprint much as they would do with a contractor card except they do not need to pay the tool cost. When the active player acquires a blueprint card, it goes into their hand.
• Work phase: This phase can be carried out by all players simultaneously if they wish.
  Roll dice: The first action that occurs in the work is rolling dice.
  After this, there are several types of action that can be performed during the work phase and players carry them out in any order they choose.
  • Headquarters/basic actions: All 3 basic actions involve assigning the rolled dice to spaces on the headquarters board. The numbers rolled will affect where those can be assigned and what they do.
    • Research: Dice with any value can be assigned to this action. For each dice assigned this way, the player can draw a card from the blueprint deck (Not the face-up cards.)
    • Generate: Only dice numbering 1-3 can be assigned to this action, then the player would acquire energy tokens equal to the value of the dice assigned. E.g., if a 1 and a 3 are placed in generate, the player would gain 4 energy.
    • Mine: Only dice numbering 4-6 can be placed here and each die assigned earn the player a metal token.
      Matched numbers: If a pair of matching numbers are assigned any single basic action, it increases the amount the player gain by 1. If 3 matching numbers are assigned, it would earn the player an extra 2.
      Putting 5 and 5 into research or mine would earn the player 3 blueprints/metal tokens.
      If a player somehow would manage to put 3, 3 and 3 into generate, it would earn them 11 energy!​
  • Build blueprints: Players may build any number of blueprint cards from their hand provided they can meet all the costs, this will of course involve discarding blueprint cards with the identical tool symbol.
  • Activate buildings: Players may activate buildings that have been built in any order they see fit. Each building can only be activated once per turn however.
    Buildings have an activation cost, this might be a resource or even a die and will produce some other resource for the player.
• Extra dice: Some abilities allow players to acquire extra dice to use, these always come from the supply of grey/white dice, are temporary and will return back to their supply at the end of the round.
• Next round: Once all players have finished their actions, the first player marker moves to the player on the right and a new round begins with the next market phase.

Endgame
Play continues until either a player has built their 10th card or acquired their 12th good.
In either case, the current round ends and 1 more round is played.
Players then total the VPs from their buildings and the goods they gained.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
On a basic level, Fantastic Factories is mechanically pretty straightforward; acquire blueprints, acquire resources to build factories, use factories to acquire resources.

It's a mid-weight engine building game that provides players with strong card synergy and offers a good selection of choices and avenues to follow for building that engine.
I feel for the most part that players will want to focus on blueprints and building them, which is natural as this is what gets resources and VPs.
Players shouldn't neglect the contractors who provide instant if transitory benefits for a relatively low cost. Applied at the right time, they can be game changers - provided they're available at the right time! Once again, it's a case of reacting to opportunities as they are revealed.

There are a couple of there elements that make Fantastic Factories interesting.

Firstly; dice rolling. Players will never be guaranteed getting the results and thus the resources they want. It means that players may not be able to build the card they originally wanted to and will need to adapt and react to the situation as it arises for optimal play. Of course it's always possible to play it safe and have all the required resources before getting a card, it's safer but it's also slower.
Secondly; Fantastic Factories makes use of a hand-as currency mechanic. This forces players to think ahead, players may need to get blueprint cards just to discard for another building, or may be forced to discard a blueprint they still want in order to build another, it can be a tough decision.

There's also some high level play, where it pays to watch what other players are working towards then wipe the marketplace to deny another a player a card they want.

Fantastic Factories is a well balanced game, it's rules aren't particularly complicated and are easy to learn but also have depth that comes from recognising how to exploit the available cards that appear during the game to build their engine optimally and to maximum efficiency.
​The gameplay is solid and will appeal to fans of engine building games, which I am. so I guess factories can be fantastic!