Fantastic video! Engine building is also my favorite mechanism. Currently, my favorite engine building game is Century, the first one. We own the Golem edition, but I believe the regular edition gameplay is identical. What I love about Century is that the engine you build, your hand of cards, does not grow exponentially in strength like in most other games. You are still limited to playing one card per turn and cards are fairly similar in power, so you never have monster turns in which you chain several powered-up actions. Mostly, what you are building for is flexibility. Goals are ever changing and you cannot be sure of what Golems you will buy. And starting conditions also change after each Golem purchase. So you do not want simply the most powerful cards in your hand. A card that turns yellow gems into purple gems is worthless to you if you only have green gems. You are trying to build an engine robust enough to let you grow from whatever leftovers you have after your last Golem purchase into one of the available Golems and do it faster than the other players. Also, this influences the Golems you try to purchase because it may be more advantageous to get a less valuable golem so that you retain a set of gems that will make it easier to get the next golem with the cards you still have in hand. So many decisions and options with such a simple ruleset. Somehow, I enjoy this kind of engine building better than others.
A cooperative game with engine building that comes almost instantly to mind as deserving of recognition is: Mechs vs. Minions. While it is a programming game, your program is semi-permanent so that your Mech gets (hopefully) better and better as you place your cards and you are placing those cards in tandem with your team-mates so as to better facilitate each other's moves. Further, as you kill more and more minions, you unlock progressively more powerful weapons and abilities for not only yourself, but also your mates' mechs. A terrific game combining programming, engine building and team-work.
Engine building games also aid in narrative. It helps to tell a story to the players which I love. I love learning about this world I'm playing in. Engine building is definitely one of my favourite mechanisms!
Roll for the Galaxy is also one if my favourite engine building games, along with Terraforming Mars and Scythe of course! 😁 thanks for the video Jamie.
Building engines whether it's small or big for me is a really enjoyable part of playing a game. It's just so fun to continuously get better and try new things. I agree so much with your final comments! It's something I aim for in my game.
Very good list. Terraforming Mars was the game that made me realize that I like engine building even more than worker placement. Also like San Juan, Great Western Trail, and Pulsar 2849
Dominion was my first introduction to the concept of engine building, and I fell in love instantly. I even love how accurately the term describes the experience.
Another great list that proves how good this mechanism truly is. I'd like to add some games just to highlight engine building once more: Valeria Card Kingdom is from round one an engine builder, Kemet with all the wonderful technology you can purchase, Wendake by adding new tiles to your own 3x3 grid, Myrmes that has a wonderful tech track, Blood Rage besides miniatures and combats is all about engine, Lorenzo il Magnifico praises engine building in certain action spots, the pretty new game Everdell is a lovely engine builder and last but not least and I was a bit shocked that you forgot to mention it (but I know, it's hart to pick just 10) is of course maybe my actual King of Engine Building: Manhattan Project Energy Empire. Thanks, Jamey!
Lord of the Rings the Card Game is a classic CCG in that your Fellowship acquires more henchmen and resources to out 'produce' the scenario deck. You begin each scenario more often than not 'behind the 8 ball' and have to dig your way out of it while completing the overall story arc.
So dice based engine builders that I really enjoy are My village - you draft two dice but as the game goes on you build up available actions and resources to use. Santa Maria - also dice drafting but building up a colony of resources and actions and also moving along tracks that improve your actions. Slightly related to dice is energy empire. And I also enjoy Crisis. But great pick with Orleans
Some of my favorites: Deus: Where every time you play a new card to build a building, you trigger all the cards you played previously of that type as well. Crisis: Where you build and man factories and resource production buildings, and run them so that you create resources, then consume those resources to refine them into more valuable goods that you then can export to help your country not go bankrupt San Juan: Simpler than Race for the Galaxy, thus easier to teach new players, and it plays faster.
2 engine building with opportunism rather than strategy : 7 wonders (without leaders), it's a wonderfu world. Your choices will be oriented by circumstances or tactical issues rather than strategy. You might feel you get stronger, but you frequently feel your choice is dicted by the present elements and balance. Evaluation of the present situation is stronger than projection. So engine building is not necessarily synonym of profound strategy.
The Manhattan Project: Energy Empire is one of my favorite engine builders. And Dinosaur Island, while I haven't yet played it, looks to be a good engine builder.
I'm so glad you made this video about engine building - although I'm not a fairly experienced board gamer, the mechanism that I have more interest in is engine building and in a recent search for content about it I've not seen much. Even BGG, as you said, hasn't it as a mechanism so it's harder to identify a game that has that feeling on its gameplay. I'm even happier to know that your future games will have engine building, I just can't wait to see what's coming! :D
Steampunk Rally is an engine builder with dice. As you build your machine (literally), you can choose to incorporate features that give you more dice when certain parts get triggered, which can be used to cascade and trigger other cards that give you more dice - dice are what powers your machine, and thus your momentum and the actions you can take. And it’s a race, between historical inventors (men and women) on a race track. I think you’d love it Jamey. ⚙️💙👍
Progress: Evolution of Technology and Seven Wonders are games with tech trees that I believe are engine-builders and/or offer progression. Also, to add to list of cooperative engine building games is Legendary: A Marvel Deckbuilding Game. Thanks again for these Sunday Sitdowns! Always a highlight during my week.
My current favorite Engine Building game is Manhattan Project:Energy Empire. I understand your definition of Engine Building but when I think of Engine Building I think of making the engine and being able to run it multiple times. Some other ones I enjoy Fleet, Bloody Inn, Oh My Goods, Ora et Labora, Le Havre, London, The Colonist, Terraforming Mars, Imperial Settlers, Russian Railroads, First Class, Kings Forge, Lunarchitects, Glen More, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Glory to Rome, Race & Roll for the Galaxy. And pretty much any Deck Builder. I know some might question a few of my choices as more of production chain games but I think Engine Building encapsulates production games too. Hoping to pick up Abyss soon because I hear that is a great Engine Building game.
Space Base is a fairly unique engine-building dice game, but instead of more or upgraded dice, you get to manipulate what you get for the dice roll. While there is some improvement to the engine on your roll, most of the engine is improved for what you get on other players' rolls. It's a little like Machi Koro, but really ramps up the engine-building and has a card-display mechanic like Splendor.
Eric M Lang's Quarriors! and Wizkid's Dice Masters. Both amazing games. Like deck building with dice, but the dice also give resources to buy more dice to use. Villages of Valeria is one of my favorites as well.
I'm also a big fan of Terraforming Mars. Would include Altiplano - tho Orleans is already there, so it's OK ;) - and Roll for the Galaxy, which fits perfectly the dice-based engine builder type you mentioned. Also, Viticulture definitely deserves a mention :)
Just did first walk-through of Orleans today. Agree with you (18 rounds helps exercise the engine you've built). It also allows buying specialist buildings to add more efficient and new actions. Some map exploration added in, and worker specialization, which feeds into the engine. Also like Clans of Caledonia for its easy display of scoring as a result of player mat uncovering (similar to your points on Hansa Teutonica, which I need to try). Engine building, though a little less deep and not as much progression to different skills (just more efficiency and volume on the choices you had at beginning). Only difficulty with engine building is building a long, long progression without becoming meaningless, tedious or broken. For example, your end game mechanism for Scythe is really finely tuned, because you reach a point where additional resources start to become marginal (adding victory points, but no longer engine building). At the same time, people don't play 20-layered tech trees.
It's interesting that you mention games that remove things off of your mat in order to become stronger in a particular aspect. One that comes to my mind is Spirit Island in that regard. It also improves your "enginge" whenever you gain the power cards to increase your overall abilities (assuming your engine can handle the new cards).
Another game where are are literally engine building is Steampunk Rally. The addition of resource management and racing elements make this a very enjoyable game.
Progression games without engine building : Chess, Go, Diplomacy. In Chess, there are 3 parts in a game, in part 3, called end, your king becomes active and powerful, your towers and bishops move faster, just because the field has got empty. They did not change ability, but the aspect of the terrain made them change. In Go, any stone you put earlier becomes more and more powerful and important (if well positioned). In Diplomacy, the more centres you conquered, the more units you have, as if you had more workers in a worker placement game, you get more influence in the whole game. So the structure of games might give the same feeling of progression, without engine building. (Though you might say diplomacy is engine building when you chose to build either a fleet either an army).
Aeon's End is a good "engine builder" that is a deck-builder...which is a cooperative game that has lots of variability because of the different nemesis and the markets . Have you played "Oh My Goods"? It is a fun engine builder.
I got my video game friends into board gaming with aeons end. The co-op feeling with combined with a deck builder that you can decide the order of cards, plus the turn order deck make that game one of my favorites.
I just played Photosynthesis. This has me pondering if that would be considered engine-building. I'm leaning towards yes because the forest grows and improves its ability to spread to areas worth more points and to harvest more sunlight. On the other hand, the life cycle results in needing to cut down those big trees for points. That along with shadows cast by the increasingly crowded forest can limit a strict improvement in your engine, if not diminish it at times
Half of my personal top 10 is composed of engine building games, 2 of them actually being also dice games: Roll for the Galaxy and Dice City. Also on my list are Orleans, 51st State and Oh My Goods!
I’m the guy who posted my home brew “Scythe Corp.” corporation for Terraforming Mars on the Scythe FB page, so when you said Stonemaier is developing an engine builder with some inspiration from TM it was exciting! I just checked my plays list on bgg and my 4 most-played games are Scythe, Terraforming Mars, Viticulture, and Terra Mystica. So yes, I love engine builders too. I would propose that engine builders are more likely to have high replayability. I could be biased by my own tastes, but given that every game you start with nothing, and have to make it grow, it just feels like you want to go back to it again and again. Scythe, Terra Mystica, and Terraforming Mars also couple engine building with asymmetric powers, making me wonder if those mechanisms naturally pair together well? That’s another mechanism that makes those games so repayable. (Viticulture does this in a minor way with the mama and papa cards.) Dice games that are engine builders: Alien Frontiers. You can use dice actions to gain more dice, and also to obtain cards that enhance your actions.
1. Blood Rage 2. Seasons 3. Great Western Trail 4. Scythe 5. Terraforming Mars 6. Argent: The Consortium 7. 51st State: Master Set 8. Deus 9. Century: Spice Road 10. City of Iron You could argue that Robinson Crusoe has engine-building in form of the "technology" you can build, that helps you. Mech vs. Minions is also engine building How long have you been into "modern" board games and how did you get "hooked"? One particular game or?
In mentioning Dice Forge, which we love, you asked about other games that might let you improve or increase the dice you use as you play. I think One Deck Dungeon does this, with the game allowing you to improve your characters abilities (and sometimes adding more dice) as you play. Also, it's a coop game, and has a campaign mode that allows ongoing improvements to your engine from game to game.
@@jameystegmaier Yeah, some mechanic needs to be added to allow the player some extra turns to enjoy the satisfaction of having their engine running that they spend most of the game playing. Sure, they can probably learn create more efficiencies in engine building in later games.
As far as I know, the first game to introduce dice engine building mechanics was TO COURT THE KING (Re-edited as Favor of the Pharaoh). So maybe I have to thank Mr. Tom Lehmann for being the father of this mechanic that I love. What do you think? Can you think of an earlier one? From all the others that came after, my favorites are Roll for the galaxy, Dice Forge, and Kingsburg. Considering all of them as "pure" dice engine builders, not engine builders driven by dice; like Lorenzo il Magnifico (other game I love). In my opinion "pure" engine building games are those in which your hand of dice improves through the game, either developing or growing. After thinking about it. I consider kingsburg more on the worker placement side.
Suggestion for a term for upgrades that get revealed by removing tokens from your player mat: Revealed Abilities or Revealed Upgrades Revealed Enhancements Personally I love this mechanic in engine building games. Scythe was the first one that I found it in, and it does it really well. A light bulb went on in my head when I saw it and I loved how intriguing it was. Terra Mystica does it really well too. I never knew about Hansa Teutonica before this video so I was happy to find it. Clans of Caledonia does it too. But it is such a great mechanic I think it should have a name.
Terraforming Mars, Terra Mystica and Scythe remain the best examples to me of engine building with real choice. You might add Through the ages and Age of the Renaissance. Magic in a way can be added, eventhough the engine building is prior to the game. Kind of metagame.
Wow. You have a slightly different definition for Engine Building than what I thought it was - I thought Engine Building involved choosing to incorporate a card that triggers or builds in power when combined with other cards, which then cascades onto other cards. For me, Evolution Climate, Oceans, Everdell, and Steampunk Rally are some of my favourite Engine Builders.
I'm a fan of Race for the Galaxy and Terraforming Mars, but also the various Manhattan Project games (Manhattan Project 1/2, and Energy Empire). It is great to have a sense of progress and to see your engine rolling. I guess I never considered improvements that don't lead to resource gaining and automation as engine building, but I guess I can see that as a form of engine building. Stuff like improving your character's stats, or your nation almost feel more like RPG upgrading rather than engine building to me. You are leveling up or improving your character throughout the game. It is too bad there isn't more of a specific term to delineate the two kinds of engine building, And if you were to distinguish between the two, where would you draw the line? For instance, Scythe is kind of a hybrid of just upgrading vs resource gathering, while something like Posthuman or even Betrayal at House on the Hill (or any number of other games that involve characters that level up or improve), you are improving your character, making your character stronger, but you aren't really building any kind of resource gathering engine.
Obviously, I have to pick Viticulture/Tuscany as my #1 engine building game game. Aside from that being #1, the rest are not in order. Viti/Tuscany Tzolkin Concordia Orleans Great Western Trail Russian Railroads Puerto Rico Deluxe Suburbia Myrmes Terraformin Mars Honorable mention - Colonists. Orleans Coop expansion module would qualify as the coop/engine builder for certain. I wish more games offered coop expansions for teaching and more friendly play versions. The top 6 of my list would all work as coop. looking back, the engine build aspect of Viticulture is what we first fell in love with. It was the first time we had that deep sense of satisfaction that our actions amounted to something more than the sum of them individually. We especially enjoy games where production growth is not the challenge but rather how well you control and direct the growth. Even when you lose, you feel the neural reward of having made something better than it was. Individually, the elements we love most in builders per game is Buildings - Tuscany Hand of action/point cards - Concordia Deck of cows - GWT Worker bag building - Orleans Buildings - Tzolkin Track progression - Russian Railroads
An engine building dice game that I can think of is Artifacts Ink by Red Raven games. Also, Manhattan Project: Energy Empire has a component of dice engine engine building where you may purchase dice throughout the game.
Well I can't argue with your #2 and #3 here. TM is a great game I'm very bad at playing. At my game club you'll see at least 2 tables of this being played every week, without fail, and the game's 3 years old now.
BGG doesn't have engine building listed as a mechanism, but they do have tableau building listed as a family of games. Many of the engine building games I've looked up fall under that family on BGG.
Yggdrasil is an engine-building-ish coop. You have to individually forge weapons to better engage the different baddies, withstanding the brunt of their assault while you're trying to spend a few "useless" actions improving your chances of actually pushing them back later in the game. If feels real good to have the +3 weapon and kick Loki in the nuts back out of Asgard.
My 2 cents for a dice engine builder is an older game: Kings Forge. Really neat with dice drafting and some mitigation and take that elements... Another small and quick card engine builder is The Builders (middle ages) A parentheses in engine building would maybe be Alien frontiers, but that one might not fall into the engine builder category? Great list otherwise.
18 rounds in Orleons, I think - 3 each of 6 events. For some reason I didn't think about it as engine building despite it clearly being so - Three of the types of actions do nothing but engine building for you (Knights which lets you draw more workers per turn, the one that gives you technology to make it easier to access actions, and the one that gives you more actions you can take in the form of buildings - Even the instant benefit spaces usually have some engine building going on, the more you take the one that gives you money the more money you take next time you take it, the more you move the farming track the better the goods you get when you next do that, even the end game scoring track gives you increasing amounts of cash when the event that gives cash based on progress on that track comes up)
Two Engine Building Dice games came to mind while viewing this video - Dice City and Machi Koro. Coop Engine Building - Sentinels of the Multiverse or CO₂: Second Chance
I need to try Dice City. And I didn't think about Sentinels, but I can see how it would apply (specifically any permanent cards you play, since you're not improving your deck during the game).
Trains > Tyrants of the Underdark > Clank, Orleans, Scythe, Mombasa, Great Western Trail, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Concordia, Terraforming Mars and Sidereal Confluence.
Jamey, to be fair, only Between Two Cities and Euphoria don't really have engine building elements of the games you've published, and both of those offer progression in other ways - In the case of Euphoria the game gets faster the longer the game's gone on for generally so while I'm not really building a personal engine, my actions tend to make everyone's actions better (I just try and do things that will make my actions that little bit better than everyone else's. And not get shut out of market construction to avoid that penalty), while Between Two Cities gives the sense of building something.
Based on your deck building comments, I would suggest you try Path of Light and Shadow. It's an amazing deck builder and area control. Does it better than any other deck builder.
Great list, thank you Jamey. Really like the mix of lighter and heavier games on your list, wasn't that obvious to me, that there are several lighter games that have engine-building. Have you played Prosperity by Knizia and Bleasdale? For me the best engine-building city-building (that's a mouth full) game :)
Not counting Charterstone because I haven't finished it, and trying to rate these games for how good the engine building is in my opinion rather than my general opinion of them, but it's hard to decouple fully. 10. Friday 9. 7 Wonders Duel 8. Core Worlds 7. Agricola 6. Caverna 5. Race for the Galaxy 4. Patchistory 3. Viticulture 2. Pandemic Legacy 1. Scythe
Great Western Trail utilizes the "pick up and benefit" playboard experience, and its engine building takes multiple forms that interact (deckbuilding, core abilities, trail building, rising sales cap, etc.). Legacy games are a great example of a format with (potentially) strong progression that doesn't have to be about engine building. Pandemic Legacy has very little engine building to speak of - really just improving the characters, at least in Season 1 - but the narrative and mechanical unlocks offer the same sense of building reward. Yes, many legacy games are also punishing, but the sense of progression is often directly tied to or comes out of that escalating difficulty. Board game designers interested in engine building should also analyze certain video games. Civilization & XCOM are two great examples of near-pure engine building in the digital space.
I think Andor is a really nice Co-op game with some kind of engine building (you can roll more dice if you get stronger and you can buy items, that give you some new abilities etc...) 😊 Have you played Andor? :) Thanks for that nice vid! Maybe I’ll buy myself Terraforming Mars or Orleans. Those games seem to be really nice!
Regarding Splendor, have you played Gizmos or any of the Century games? Gizmos especially really emphasizes engine-building to new levels for lighter fare.
There is a bit of engine building in the Rosenburg worker placement classics. It's more pronounced in say Ora et Labore than say Agricola though typically & frustratingly you often only get to "run your engine" once. Great Western Trail can also be a bit engine buildery if you set up a series of buildings that chain together well. There is some in the X-com co-op game where you research improvements to your capabilities. And of course there is in any dungeon crawler with loot & levelling (or in Eldritch Horror - classically when I play I spend the first half of the game firefighting while my mate powers his character up then his toon clears all of the objectives in a hurry in the second half, while I spend my time fire-fighting some more, ho hum.) This does raise the question what is engine building.? Some of these for example Terrra Mystica mostly just increase your income so you get to do more stuff simply by having more stuff. To my mind this is just economic investment rather than engine building . I feel engines are more the do something more efficiently then do something else a bit more efficiently with a bit of a qualitatively different option thrown in. So production chains in Clans of Caledonia or resource conversion in Ora et Labore or even the improvement to actions in Tzollkin, where you still have to "do" something to get your rewards. I guess a lot of levelling games feel like this - certainly Mage Knight fits the bill but Legend of Drizzt & sec. probably do not I have said the reason I prefer Gaia Project to TM is that is emphasises the engine builder characteristics so I am not really disagreeing with you, it's just that "engine builder" is a loosely defined term.
I contemplated Ora et Labora for this, though I wasn't quite sure if it qualified. Your options for worker placement get better throughout the game, but I couldn't think of any automation improvements. I should have mentioned Agricola, though, as it has engine building through the occupations.
I wouldn't put Risk in the category of engine-building, as you're not actually improving the things you're doing--you're just increasing your odds. There is a sense of progression in Risk, though.
I'd be happy to consider that! I'll see if I can find an angle to talk about them in depth. I've made videos about Magic, Hearthstone, and Keyforge already.
@@jameystegmaier It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on LCGs and maybe CCGs as a model for expanding on a game people are invested in. And maybe what you do or don't like about them. I know you've discussed long term support quite a bit lately on your blog.
Nations: The dice game is a really fun, fast played engine builder with dice, so by getting better dice and /or more as the game goes on :) Good list otherwise, even though for me Terra Mystica has been replaced by Gaia Project these days.
Would Robinson Crusoe qualify as having engine building mechanics as a coop game? You are definitely upgrading shelter, weapons and tools to improve yourselves for the remainder of the game, but because the game throws so much bad stuff your way, it may not feel that rewarding
I would! You get better throughout the game in that rolling, say, a 3 early on may give you nothing or very little, but by the end of the game it may reap several benefits.
What are your thoughts on Great Western Trail? Infernal Contraption is a fantastic engine building card game, though I would suggest skipping the expansion.
I.C. was a game by Privateer Press. You are a goblin making a machine to destroy each other goblin. Every round you draft cards/parts and add them to your machine. Then you 'run' your machine to see what happens. Sometimes it is glorious, sometimes it explodes in your face. It is a quick, wonderful and fun game.
In my (admittedly) few plays of Spirit Island, I found the endgame feeling scripted, as if it was inevitable that we were going to win. I wonder if that is precisely because of the engine building and becoming more powerful in later rounds. I wonder if it would be tough to design a game where the player feels BOTH the escalation of their own engines as well as the escalation in that perilous feeling I love so much in Pandemic.
funny you ask. I was developing a cooperative engine building + dice placement game for about a year. The concept of start with a weak space ship that you build up in to a powerfull machine, was a fun feling that want to achive with this proyect. I just was balancing a new versión right now. Would you like to play it? drive.google.com/open?id=1NekmNI9AhhpwHGA8sQMr0rwdP8RHHcij I would glad to have some feed back from someone whit your level of knolwge amd pasion about this kind of games. ¡See you on the Facebook stream!
That sounds fun! I wish I had the time to playtest games for other people, but I have my hands full with our games and our submissions. If you think it's a good fit for Stonemaier Games and it matches our submission guidelines, feel free to submit it to us! :)
Your game shelf is a mess. Sort it out and obtain OSD 😀 it would be great if you could create segments in your videos to skip to the sections us viewers want to see please. Like your honesty and positivity in your videos. Sorry but didn’t like your Scyth (mostly the art) and will instead prefer playing my little scythe with the kids. Engine building is great in games and I liked some games in your selection.
