Image taken from https://boardgamegeek.com/image/4095959/fantastic-factories

Designers: Joseph Z. Chen, Justin Faulkner
Publisher: Metafactory Games
Artist: Joseph Z. Chen

Fantastic Factories is a simple, clever engine building game focused on creating the best possible tableau from different buildings that get constructed. This one feels classic; very streamlined and straightforward, simple to learn and teach, but still involves some fun decision making.

Like I said, this game is very simple. Each round, players can take a blueprint card for free or discard one card from hand with a matching symbol to acquire a contractor card instead. Blueprint cards get added to hand and contractors have a one-time use immediate ability. After that, players simultaneously roll their worker dice and then perform actions using their dice as well as building blueprints from hand. All actions can take place in any order, and everything is optional. Each building has a resource cost but also requires the player to discard a blueprint card from hand with a matching symbol.

The final round of the game is triggered once a player has accumulated twelve goods (which are acquired by constructing and utilizing buildings) or a player has built their tenth building. Points are scored in only two ways: buildings and goods.

The solo mode has the player face off against an opponent but there isn’t too much to keep up with, thankfully. The rival, called The Machine, works to build a tableau of building cards as players do, but the game end isn’t triggered once they have ten. Each round, one dice of each color gets rolled; the green die determines which card The Machine takes from the market, and the other dice regulate which building types produce goods and which don’t. If the value of each rolled die is lower than or equal to the number of corresponding cards in The Machine’s compound (tableau), they manufacture a good. The goal is to score more points than them by the end of the game.

Overall, the solo design works well and it’s easy to facilitate but it is VERY random. There can be turns when The Machine produces zero goods and others where they manufacture four goods. Also, the card they take from the market is random and on more than one occasion, The Machine took the one card I was needing. I’d play it again solo, and I appreciate that the solo implementation exists, but I think I enjoy the game more as a multiplayer experience.

Besides that, I really like how each building costs resources plus a discarded card from hand of the same type. I could see it being easy to fly through this game if that wasn’t the case, so I like the added challenge of optimizing actions as well as buildings. I also feel the game takes less time than advertised. In our experience, both solo and two player games didn’t take longer than thirty minutes and set up and tear down are easy.

One thing worth mentioning is that this game is very multiplayer solitaire. Besides the occasional “dang, you stole my card!” there’s really not much interaction between players. We don’t mind that, but others might.

Fantastic Factories is just a solid game overall. There’s nothing super special or unique about it, but it’s a really good, classic engine builder that’s easy to get into but still provides some fun thinkiness. I wouldn’t say its replayability is high but it’s still good – there are a lot of different building cards, and each game will provide unique combinations.