The fast and furious gameplay, interesting and simultaneous engie-building, and interactive, unique auction (where losing is sometimes good! The Auction is so unique and immensely enjoyable that the more common Production phase is entirely forgivable. Depending on your play style, Auctions can range from a lively phase with a lot of talking to dead serious poker-like affairs where nobody talks. Then again, you might not give a rat's ass for the Company itself, yet its compensation is exactly what you need to advance your cause. Don't dare forget your competitors' special ability; you can't win without factoring it into your play.

Almost all of the in-game time will be spent making interesting and valuable decisions and not on dealing with fiddly rules, and as I mentioned earlier, I really like the how the characters allow each player to break the rules in interesting ways. Furnace also includes capitalist cards that contain unique effects, and if you want, you can choose to deal one out to each player at the start of the game.Values are different to players and you can never guarantee you are going to get exactly the cards you’ll eventually need. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Players take turns placing one of their discs on one of these cards, but you cannot place a disc on a card if a disc of the same value or colour is already present. You want to lose that card, yet not without bidding the highest possible for it, namely a disc with a value of 3. Once everyone has collected their compensation and the cards that they won in the Auction phase, players will then move into the Production phase. Companies don't just state what they do in their basic form, but what they will do once you upgrade them. To do this, more often than not, they will need to trade coal into steel, steel into oil and oil into cash.It makes for a different, substantially less flexible game where mistakes are penalized harshly while good plays are rewarded the same way as before. All of this exists within beautiful industrial buildings and structures from the epoch of Art Deco, Constructivism, and Bauhaus. Honestly, if I have any one criticism, it’s that I would have liked there to have been perhaps ten to choose from – but that’s only because I like what they do to the game so much. Shameless plug: for more gaming news and content (including, for example, pictures of Furnace that I am unfortunately not able to upload on RPG.

This adds a c-c-combo element to the Production phase that just feels great, and every token feels interesting and powerful. In the first few games I played, most players would identify the company card they really wanted to win and throw their 4-value disc on it. There is a political message on unregulated, nepotistic capitalism here; the irony of Russians making such a game makes it ever more pronounced.

As it is you’ll probably burn out on it after a few plays and it will become an “every now and then” type of game. During the production phase players work through their company cards, producing goods, converting goods and hopefully earning money. The internal monologue is no less tense, examining every possible crease and fold of the strategic plan. Furnace is an engine-building Eurogame in which players take on the roles of 19th-century capitalists building their industrial corporations and aspiring to make as much money as they can by purchasing companies, extracting resources, and processing them in the best combinations possible.