Furnace Up Your Sleeve

There aren't many board games that come along with a revolutionary new mechanic unlike anything I've seen before in another game. But fortunately, there's plenty of room to achieve a game that feels novel and different even just making small tweaks to existing ideas. Furnace is a recent example.

Furnace pits up to four players against each other in a four-round competition to build the best industrial empire. In each round, things start with an auction phase. Players bid against each other over a series of cards that either produce one of the game's resources or convert resources (to points, or to some other resource). After the auctioning, there's a phase where each player runs the engine they've built, using the cards they've acquired one time each to generate the most "stuff" they can.

It's such a fast game to play and so simple to explain that a natural gut reaction would be to say "there's really not much here." But how the auctions are conducted makes all the difference, generating a lot of brinksmanship with your opponents and creating fun tension and competition.

Each player has 4 bidding chips, valued 1 through 4. On your turn, you place one of your bidding chips on one of the cards up for sale. There are a lot of cards available (equal to the number of players, plus four more), but things fill up fast. That's because you're not allowed to put more than one of your chips on the same card, and you're not allowed to put the same chip value on a card that an opponent has already placed there.

What's more, once the chips are all placed, you go through each card one by one, and it's not exactly "winner take all." While the highest bidder on each card takes it to add to their engine, every other player who bid on it gets a smaller reward specified by the card -- and takes that reward as many times as the value on the chip they bid for it.

These two tweaks together create a surprisingly broad strategic landscape. Sometimes you're bidding to win and sometimes you're actually bidding to lose. Losing with a high number can pay handsome rewards... but bidding high-ish can mean you win something you didn't actually want to win. Bidding a number that boxes out an opponent is another important nuance (when you can leave them unable to play the numbers they have remaining on a card you know they want). Cards are also auctioned in order, and rewards can sometimes be conversions rather than resources -- so that order can matter a great deal.

Yes, when you get to the "production" phase of a round, the game silos the players off from one another, everyone running their own engine independently. But this less interactive phase takes far less time than the rest. And even it has some optional wrinkles you can choose to play with: the default rules for the game let you use your collected cards in any order, while a variant forces you to build everything in a specific order as you acquire cards and then to always run your engine from left to right.

Designer Ivan Lashin has not only managed to generate welcome nuance in a game with a slimmer rules set, he's managed to do it in a game that only takes around 10-15 minutes per player to play. I don't know about you, but I'm always in the market for a game that fills the gaming niche of "let's play one more that's quick, but not brainless."

I'd give Furnace a B+. There are a fair number of games somewhat close to it, but in my limited plays so far, I've enjoyed it more than the competition.