I love a good resource generating engine builder. Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition and It’s a Wonderful World are some of my faves. Furnace combines the type of resource generation that I tend to like with an interesting bidding mechanism that adds a little twist to the genre. The big question is, is this enough to make the game stand out from the rest?

Furnace Overview

Furnace, designed by Ivan Lashin and published by Arcane Wonders, is an engine building game for 2-4 players set during the 19th century industrial revolution. In the game players assume the role of capitalists trying to acquire companies and produce and exchange resources in an effort to generate the most income by the end of 4 rounds. To achieve this, players will be bidding on a row of cards and either acquiring those cards for resource generation or producing resources for cards that they did not win. Once cards are part of a players tableau, they can be used for resource generation or exchanging to ultimately help produce income to win the game.

Setup

Furnace has a pretty quick set up. Give each player a random start up card and capitalist card. Start up cards are the beginning companies you will start the game with and they go into your tableau. Set the coal, iron, oil, upgrade, and money resource tokens within reach of all players. Generate the resources that the start up card provides and grab a set of the bidding disks along with the player token of the same color. Lay out the round counter and set the counter to round 1. The remaining company cards make up the company deck and are shuffled and placed on the round counter. Depending on the player count the cards are then laid out in a market row for auction. Total set up takes less than 5 min.

Furnace Gameplay

Furnace is played out over 4 rounds and consists of 2 phases for each round, the auction phase and the production phase. In the auction phase, players will take turns bidding on the row of company cards to either acquire a card they want or gain the compensation of the card if they don’t win it. This process is fairly simple. When it is your turn to bid take one of the 4 disks and place it on a card. The bidding process goes around until all players have used all 4 chips. The catch to this bidding process is that no card can have 2 of the same value disks on it.

Everyone Gets a Prize

Once all players have used all their chips 1 of 2 awards are given out. If the player has bid the most on the card they win the card and it goes into their tableau. If a player did not win the card but bid on it they receive the compensation value at the top of the card. This compensation can be resource production but may also be processing and this effect is multiplied by the number chip the player used to bid on the card. So if I bid a 3 chip but did not win the card and the card has 2 coal on the top I receive 6 coal as compensation.

Start Those Coal Fired Engines

Once the bidding is complete and all the rewards and compensation is handed out now it is time to move onto the production phase. During the production phase players will simultaneously activate cards in their tableau, resolving the effects on the bottom of the cards. Each card can only be activated once and the cards can be activated in any order the player chooses. Effects on these cards will range from more resource generation to processing which will allow players to exchange resources for other resources. Once all players are finished with production the round ends and the next round of bidding will begin. After 4 rounds of bidding and production, the player with the most money is the winner.

Furnace Impressions

Components

The components in Furnace are pretty good. Most of the resources are wood tokens and the cards are of decent quality. Non wood tokens are pretty thick cardboard and will hold up pretty well. The card artwork is nice but is fairly muted, seems to fit the style of 19th century industrial revolution. Honestly, I was playing more attention to the resources and production of the cards themselves than the card artwork.

Gameplay

Gameplay in Furnace is . . . ok. There are some cool decisions to be made when it comes to bidding on the cards. There may be a card that synergizes well with your tableau that you will go all in on but there are also times when you may really want the compensation that can be had from the card. This plays out in a way that will have you bidding to purposely lose the auction but enough that you will maximize the compensation you receive from the card. This can backfire sometimes if you end up bidding the most on a card that you really did not need but wanted the compensation, a nice risk/reward game plays out amongst the players here.

The production part of the game I found to be somewhat ho-hum. Optimize activation of the cards, do what they say and move on to the next round. Now, things are made a bit more interesting with the ability to upgrade the cards in your tableau for better production. There are also starting player powers that you get from your tycoon but these just did not feel very important. I also think that my middle of the road feelings of this part of the game is because I have played some great games that execute on the production/engine building much better than Furnace. This is where I am torn. The game has a cool mix of mechanics but the engine building that is central to the game is done much better in others in my opinion.

Theme

This game is in my opinion. Just. So. Dry. I understand that talking about theme is a very subjective topic. For me, this game felt like working in a corporate office. Bidding was interesting and did provoke some table talk. Not knowing the company I am bidding on and only knowing the production values made me feel like I am just a soulless, life crushing CEO (Maybe that was what they were going for). The experience just came down to me looking at icons, putting disks on cards and moving resources around to generate money.

Again, I compare this to other games that have some theme to them (I love getting the rad suits in TM). This game would have hit better for me if there was text that let me know I was bidding on an oil refinery or coal mine and the production/compensation matched. Some people will like the iconography only but I def want more than that. I did not realize how much I like some thematic text on my cards until I played this game. The dryness of the game hurt the gameplay for me.

Final Verdict on Furnace

I do like the bidding mechanic in the game. But I feel the back half of a round is done better in other games. Unfortunately, the bidding alone does not do enough to make this game stand out among the other engine builders that are out there. If I played this game in a vacuum, it would probably be a solid 3. The dry theme and better options out there really take this down a notch.