
It’s one of the finest examples of eurogames you can find and for that, Caverna sits high up on our list today. How far you expand, what resources you try and monopolize, and how you convert your rooms to make your cave/homestead create a completely customized resource engine by the end of the game. Each building produces something or upgrades your abilities.Įach player will start out with the same generic cave with a needlepoint “Cave Sweet Cave” hanging over the doorway, but that’s where the similarities end. The engine portion comes in the form of your personal homestead/cave. There are a lot of new things to do and even to explore in Caverna. The rules are easier to manage and the complexity of the game gets amped up. Instead of the traditional farmstead, players will instead set up in a cave, taking on the role of a happy dwarf family.ĭesigner Uwe Rosenburg took the lessons learned from Agricola and basically made a 2.0 version of Agricola. Caverna: The Cave FarmersĬaverna is the spiritual successor to Agricola.

Terraforming Mars is a bit fiddly with rules and components, but for a solid sci-fi, engine-building game, it’s damn hard to beat. You’ll also be struggling to play a few cards at the beginning stages, but once the engine is built, you’ll be powering through high-powered cards and abilities. The early stages of the game can be difficult, especially for new players that won’t understand the upgrades and bonus synergies, but they’ve built a pretty incredible starter scenario that helps jump-start play. It’s a great small group game, working best with 3+ players.Įach player’s corporation is represented by their own player board and as the game progresses, they’ll build up the infrastructure necessary to change the Red Planet into a much more livable green and blue one. Terraforming Mars takes my top spot for an engine-building board game, due to its awesome mechanics.Įach player takes on the role of a corporation tasked with terraforming Mars. You better believe that terraforming an entire planet requires an engine. The fun comes with perfecting your engine, making it as efficient and useful as possible. This continues forever until you’re not really doing anything but watching your glorious resource engine spit out stuff for you to turn into other stuff. That wood can then be used to make more logging camps or other buildings. Your logging camp then gathers wood for you. First, you’ll manually gather some wood and then you’ll build a logging camp with that wood. It’s similar to an incremental game like a civilization builder. It could be any resource, victory points, or materials.
#Mount and blade viking conquest lumber camp generator#
The engine starts out small and becomes a resource generator by the end of the game. Players typically start out from scratch and build up the engine by adding different combinations or add ons to the “engine”.

In certain games, players will build their own “engine” throughout the course of the game. Before we go further, let’s answer the question, “What is an engine-building board game?”
