Just got done with a great board game night. We played Jorvik, First Class, and Energy Empre.
We weren’t too hot on Jorvik. Personally, it might be my least favorite Stefan Feld game. For me, it just felt too flat without any interesting drama.
First Class gets a lot of love most of the time it hits the table. It’s about a 30-45 minute engine builder where you’re drafting cards to build up passenger trains. It’s got cute / weird scoring bonuses like getting extra points when you get luggage on the train or extra cash when you can get your passengers to take a seat. It feels a bit like a filler version of Russian Railroads with the same sort of exponential ramp: the first round you’re scoring 5 points, the second you’re scoring around 20 and the third you can easily score over 100. I find that momentum extremely compelling and satisfying. Not my favorite of this type of game, but soooo much easier to teach and understand than Russian Railroads.
I loved Energy Empire. It’s a worker placement game about essentially managing the economies of modern nations but with a focus on energy creation / consumption. It has a great narrative arc right from the get go where you choose which nation you’re playing and get quite distinct start conditions. I played as India and had more workers than anyone else. France got to start with Nuclear energy generator right away. Throughout the game, different random events pop up at key times that can have a pretty drastic effect on the game and they all tie the narrative together really well. I was lucky to have a turn right after a we found a bunch of underwater oil that let me get a ton of oil for cheap. Over the course of the game, you can invest in new energy production which enables you to power more infrastructure. As India, I opted to ignore building my own energy factories and just bought and burned tons of oil every turn as well as relying on my extra population instead of electricity where possible. Using that to build an economic powerhouse focused on banking, airports, and mass transit ended up being a surprisingly viable strategy! All that in a suprisingly simple design. Very excited to play it more.