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Furnace is an engine-building game (in a somewhat literal sense) for 2-4 players, designed by Ivan Lashin. This game is as industrial as it gets, you’re playing as capitalists and you’re trying to build the most efficient engine to extract the most resources and more importantly, the most money. Furnace is a pretty speedy game too, despite all the symbols, after 4 rounds the game is finished so you’ve got to make the most of every round.
Into the Fire
Every round of Furnace is separated into two phases, the auction phase and the production phase. Every player receives 4 auction chips ranked between 1-4 with 4 being the highest value. They take it in turns to bid on different industrial buildings and you can decide which value of chip you’d like to use. If you don’t win the bid, you get compensated so bids are never wasted (you just might not get what you want). The symbols at the top of the cards indicate the compensation you receive if you do not win the bid, so there’s strategy here too.
After the auction phase, you go into the production phase, where you can gain, process or sell resources to optimise your company (aka your engine) to gain the most money. During this phase you can rearrange buildings that had been placed in previous rounds. Your buildings usually process one kind of material into another, so you can strategically place buildings to get the most value out of them (this can be a bit difficult to figure out if you’re not crunching the numbers).
You also have the ability to upgrade purchased buildings with upgrade tokens (with the upgraded version being on the other side of the card).
At the end of the 4 rounds, you add up all your money and see who’s won!.
Firing up the engine
I know this game will really appeal to some people. In terms of the engine building, the theme, the artwork and the tokens, for some, this is the one. I will say, that one isn’t me, the theme feels a bit bland to me (what can I say, I like to build engines with cute birds) and it lacks the replayability that other engine building games have for me. We are probably at a saturation point for engine building games (at least for me). There are variants and specific character cards to add some longevity but when the core gameplay isn’t my favourite, these don’t do much for me.
The pared back nature of Furnace will be really good for some as it feels like quite a pure engine building game and it’s easy to see how one thing leads into another in your engine. The engine might get a little confusing and this is a game where you can really refine your engine and use every single resource. But again I am not that person and I don’t want to think that hard. I find making an efficient engine fun when I can run it over and over again, but as there are only 4 rounds in Furnace you’ve got to refine your engine fast as you don’t get to use it much and that’s not really for me.
The production is great, the card artwork is lovely and the resource tokens are so fun (surely we all love a small wooden token). We used the playmat and that definitely elevated the aesthetic, I can imagine without it the tokens probably look quite disorganised and scattered.
There are lots of fun and satisfying things here, but I can’t say Furnace is my preferred engine building game. If you like the theme, the art and tightness in games, this could really be a good one for you