Carnegie
I really wasn’t sure what to find in this box. I know a lot of people talked a lot about this game; I think it had a large amount of pandemic-era success via Boardgame Arena. Could it be incredible? Perhaps it’s one of those things that’s better computerized than in analogue format?
Well, I did open the box and I discovered what’s inside: cardboard!
And, for a pandemic-era boardgame, it certainly has nice components. Now, I don’t have the deluxe edition, but the components certainly are nice. The solo-mode cards (that are actually used to some degree for 2- and 3-player games) are wonderfully thick and have a superlative-inducing linen-finish.
The triple-layer player boards are interesting and… nice? Not exceptional but satisfactorily functional.
It took me a while to actually get a solo game started. This game presents you with myriad variables to solve for, without grounding any of them firmly at the outset. For example:
Game: “Here are some cubes. You can gain and spend them to do things.”
Me: “Like what?”
Game: “You can build departments with them. And you can build projects with them, too!”
Me: “Okay, why would I do those things?”
Game: “Well, some departments will give you more opportunities to get more cubes!”
Me: “… Okay. Cyclic, but fair. What else?”
Game: “Well, you could gain some workers!”
Me: “Great. What do those do?”
Game: “You can use them to get more cubes!”
Me: <exhausted noises>
So what the game doesn’t really tell you in the rule book is that the timeline events really should be the crux of how you decide what to do and how to do it. So what does that mean? <exhausted noises> I really can’t say.
So, we’ve gotten this far and I have gleaned from the rulebook how things move, but how do you win? Victory points (the chief export of the US during the 19th century, probably) So do cubes and workers give you victory points? “No” and “sort of”, respectively. No, the majority of your victory points will come from the projects you build and the donations you make. Oh, and maybe the departments you build and the transportation you develop.
So… it’s a point salad? Yes. At the beginning of your Carnegie journey, the point salad is so opaque that is effectively a black box mechanism: turns go in one end and are transmuted into a small amount of victory points.
I think further plays will uncover increasingly more of the mysterious black box, but now I find myself in a conundrum: do I want to continue to explore this game as a solo experience and risk setting myself up to completely trounce any friends/family that sit down around a table with me in the future? I dunno. But I think I’m at least going to play a second game, this time focusing differently, and trying to get a knack for the sequence of actions that I should be doing.
Because at the end of the game, I came to appreciate that, like so many other great games, I felt torn between doing 2 or 3 different actions; each of them seemingly the best choice, but sacrificing the true potential of that action for not having completed a different action first.
There’s definitely a game here; and it appears to be clever, once you get past the multivariable algebra.