Arcane Wonders Furnace

Very good engine building game. Not as difficult as it looked. I recommend getting the playmat too but it's not necessary 😊

A great game - a light weight engine builder centered around a clever auction mechanic for deciding who gets to buy what cards. An ingenious system keeps it from feeling too bad when someone "beats you out" to a card you were after, and the next opportunity is always around the corner anyway. Best of all it's fast to set up, easy to teach, and quick to play, so you can always hope to win the rematch!But what pushed this to a 5 star was how I was treated when my copy arrived missing some components. I notified the company via their website and within minutes received an email that replacement parts were in the mail. They arrived within days, and I couldn't be happier with the game or with how Arcane Wonders treats their customers.

I picked this game up after playing it at Gencon. The game plays four rounds and has two phases per round. The first phase is an auction where players bid on a factory card. The winning bidder gets the card and the losing bidders collect a resource that the card offers. All players are guaranteed at least one factory card because the bid uses a ranking system from 1-4 and no two bids on the same card can have the same rank. This system introduces an interesting strategy and you definitely have to plan ahead to acquire cards that have production synergy with cards that provide resources.Next, there's the production phase and each card may grant a specific resource and/or transform resources into other resources or, more importantly, money. Each production card can only be used once per round. Players are generally free to do the production turn in parallel, but novice players may play one at a time just to make sure the card is played correctly.After four rounds, the player with the most money wins. The game can play pretty fast and is best with four players. However, the two player mode is still fun because there's an "AI" that bids on the auction to introduce a little more randomness to the auction result.Overall I really enjoy this game and I love playing it.

I was surprised by this one. From the hype I expected a medium complexity bidding game. Well, first of all, it's NOT a bidding game. In an bidding game you bid, someone outbids you, you outbid them. In a bidding game you can have a tie. In this game, NEITHER of those things are true. You cannot bid again on the same item after your first bid. You also cannot have a tie. So actually this is an ACTION SELECTION game, and you are just placing priority markers for action selection, with the low markers taking the secondary action and the high marker taking the card as part of their tableau to use its primary action. So... action selection and tableau building.The artwork is great, the production quality is excellent (wooden action select markers). The round marker is...weird. The resource markers are...unique. And that's good for a game like this. The theme...is good but not really connected to the actions (you turn steel into...oil? You turn oil into...coal? Huh?).I think the weakness of this game is that the theme isn't really that interesting to me, and the cards are not really lively or humorous or exciting. The actions just feel like different parts of an equation or even the same actions everywhere. There is no "Terraforming Mars" variety to the things you can do. You're basically just turning three items into the same three items and maybe upgrading here and there. As such you are lacking the excitement of It's a Wonderful World or Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition.If you want an introduction into tableau-building and production mechanisms via action selection and like your games fast you may like this one. I would try before you buy because I do feel that Ares Expedition and It's a Wonderful World are better games due to greater excitement, though both are a tad more complex in execution, though not in running the actual tableau, which is more complex here.Still, it's cheap. I just wish the box were half the size because it's frankly a ridiculous-sized box for what's in it.

This is an awesome medium weight board game. It’s easy to learn and teach but difficult to master. It combines auctioning and engine building which makes it very replayable. It can be played with 2-4 players, but when played with only two you have to add a “third computer” player to the auction phase. I think it’s slightly too complex for it to be considered a gateway game, but I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to take a step up from the easier gateway games. Overall, I would 100% recommend it.

I really like the auctioning phase, as it has some Poker vibes... Can't make it too obvious what cards you need else you get sabotaged.Plenty of replayability as they do a fairly decent job of adding variety with different starter characters and plants.I would argue it's pretty easy to learn, but may be a little tricky for children and/or those that haven't had experience with engine builder games.All in all, it has been a lot of fun for my friend circle and me!

This game has become our new favorite game to play. It is a fast-paced game that combines originality, strategy, luck, and ease of learning. This is definitely family friendly and can be easily set up. The only drawback would be that you can only play with four people.

A beautiful game of capitalism. It was very easy to learn, but it is challenging to think through your turns. Do you want to grow your resource engine, or do you want to secure the factory that makes more victory points? The auction mechanic is also clean and easy, but one simple decision has a lot of ramifications since you sometimes you want to lose so you can get the resources on the top of the card. It’s a great engine builder and auction game! Will be staying in my collection for a long time!