Fantastic Factories is fantastic. It is a quick-to-learn, very pure, engine-building game, that has won all of us over.
I love how quick this game is to set up and how fast it plays, while still giving you the feeling of having actually built something by the end of the game.
Disclosure: Thanks to Deep Water/Friendly Skeleton for giving us a review copy of this fantastic engine builder board game.
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- Facts about Fantastic Factories (Theme & Components Overview)
- How Fantastic Factories Plays (Rules & Gameplay Overview)
- Why Fantastic Factories will appeal to a lot of game groups (Review & Overall Thoughts)
Fantastic Factories Facts
Fantastic Factories comes from the design team of Joseph Z Chen, and Justin Faulkner and features awesome 70s-style artwork by Joseph. It is currently being published by Friendly Skeleton.
This tableau builder plays one to five players and is super quick due to the fact that most of the game can be played simultaneously. Even at the full player count games tend to run less than an hour.
Because of how quick the game plays, almost every time we sit down to play Fantastic Factories, we end up playing two or three games in a row.
While the game is listed for ages fourteen and up, I don’t see any reason younger players wouldn’t be able to play it or enjoy it. The community on Board Game Geek has it listed as age ten and up, and I think you could probably even go a bit younger than that.
The gist of Fantastic Factories is pretty simple. Build buildings (represented by cards), train your workers (represented by dice), and make as many goods as possible as quickly as possible. Each round you will hire a contractor or grab a blueprint card for a new building. Then you play buildings from your hand into a growing tableau and roll and spend your workers to activate your buildings in any order. You can use your workers to generate resources, produce goods, or manipulate your dice with the goal of making the best goods building engine.
You can take a look at the great card art and excellent iconography in this engine builder by checking out our Fantastic Factories Unboxing video on YouTube.
The overall quality here is really good and exceeded our expectations. The player boards are dual-layered and the game comes with a custom box insert. The instructions are very clear and include a reference for the more complicated cards. The card quality is also great.
While the game doesn’t come with it, you can also pick up a two sided Fantastic Factories Playmat (with a layout and tips for solo play on the back). There are also two expansions available, the Fantastic Factories: Manufactions expansion that adds asymmetry to the game and the Fantastic Factories: Subterfuge expansion that adds take-that elements.
For this review, I will be looking only at the base game.
How Fantastic Factories Plays
One of the best features of Fantastic Factories is how quickly you can get it to the table and how simple it is to learn.
You start with everyone grabbing a HQ board, a set of dice, one metal and three energy tokens. Shuffle up the blueprint cards and deal four to each player. Deal out a four card market to the center of the table. Next shuffle the contractors and deal out a similar four card market, placing a round “type” token above each of the four contractors.
Each round starts with a market phase where players either draft a blueprint or hire a contractor. Before drafting the active player has the option to spend one resource to discard and refill either of the two markets.
Blueprints are free but contractors have to be paid for by discarding a card from your hand that matches the token above that contractor. Some contractors have an additional cost in energy. Contractors do all kinds of things, like getting you more cards or resources, or giving you extra dice in the work phase, and more.
Next comes the work phase, which is the bulk of the game. Simultaneously players roll all of their worker dice plus any bonus dice earned from contractors. Then they place these workers onto either their HQ or onto their buildings (including any buildings built this round).
A die placed on the HQ board can earn you a single blueprint card from the top of the deck. A three or less can be placed to get you energy equal to the die value, and a four or more gets you one metal.
When placing dice, you get a bonus of one extra thing when you play a pair and a bonus of two extra things when you play a set of three. For example, if you placed three twos in the card space you would actually get five cards, whereas if you placed them in the energy spot you would get eight energy (two for each die plus a bonus two for the set of matching numbers).
At any time during this phase you can also build buildings. To do this you must discard a card of the same type from your hand and then pay the cost listed on the card you want to build. All buildings are added to your tableau. Most buildings are worth end game victory points.
Now that you have buildings in play you can activate them. You can activate each card in your tableau once. Most buildings have a cost on the left and a benefit listed on the right. Some will give you additional dice, many will give you resources, and a few will generate goods. Some factories provide you with new places to place your dice as well.
What’s important to know here is that you can do any of these things any number of times in any order (as long as you have the dice and resources needed) and that gives Fantastic Factories a strong puzzle feel.
Once any player has played at least ten buildings, or has generated at least twelve goods, you play one more round and then add up your points. Scoring in Fantastic Factories is as simple as adding the number of crates you have to the victory point value of your buildings. The player with the most points wins, with ties going to the player with the most left over resources (metal and energy).
As you can see, Fantastic Factories is quite simple, at least as far as the rules go. The depth comes from the cards; what they do, and how they interact. In this game everyone is trying to build a combination of different buildings that will work together to create a crate-making engine.
Fantastic Factories is going to be a good fit for many game groups.
Deanna and I first tried Fantastic Factories at Origins Game Fair and were instantly hooked. I remember it was the last day of the con, we were both exhausted, and Deanna was reluctant to stop and try it, but then later thanked me for convincing her to do a demo.
Once we got home and played it, we were instantly hooked. In under a week we managed to fit in a half dozen games. Even right now, as I’m writing this, I find myself thinking, “When can we play Fantastic Factories again?”
Sean ended up loving the weight of this game. He likes how you need to think about your actions, but you can also have a drink and relax and chat while waiting for others to draft or finish off their actions. It is the perfect difficulty level for a thinky game where you can still be social.
The big draw for me is how tight Fantastic Factories is. This is a very pure engine building board game that is also very thematic. It is an engine builder that is about building an engine, specifically a manufacturing engine. You take raw goods and energy and use buildings to turn these things into products. There’s nothing else going on here, no other elements to worry about.
Even with the goal of building goods, you never sell them. There’s no economy here. The goal is just the production of goods and nothing more.
Another aspect I like about Fantastic Factories is how well the game flows and how quick it is. A lot of this comes from simultaneous play during the work phase. The only part that isn’t played by everyone at the same time is the drafting element of the Market Phase, and there aren’t a lot of options there so it goes rather quick. Once the drafting portion is done, it’s just you, your dice and your cards, and trying to figure out the best way to use them all together.
All of this is aided by some very clear iconography. Everything is so clear that I don’t think we’ve ever had to pick up the rulebook to look for any clarification and I’ve yet to have to jump on the rules forums of Board Game Geek for this game. That’s something that is pretty rare with most modern games.
What’s really odd about this style of simultaneous play is that it some how doesn’t end up feeling like multiplayer solitaire. Though I have to assume that some people still felt it was, as there is an expansion specifically to address that, but with just the base game I find I’m often watching my opponents closely. I track what they are collecting and often draft specific cards to discard so that I can deny access to them for other players.
The only real negative I can think of in regards to Fantastic Factories is that the box insert doesn’t do a great job of keeping things separated, unless you keep the box flat. The rulebook even suggests that you place the punch boards under the insert after opening the game for the first time (a pro tip that is useful for many board game boxes). However, while I am sure the extra height from the inserts is helping, it’s not quite enough.
Fantastic Factories is a bit of an odd game, as it’s a meaty engine building euro that feels like a gateway game. It’s very accessible while also rewarding game mastery. There’s a puzzle aspect here that you don’t see in most quicker or lighter games, and that feels great and makes the game fun for experienced gamers.
Engine builders, in general, are not for everyone, but we think this game might help those who are on the fence. Fantastic Factories would be a great way to try out the genre to see if it’s right for you and your group.
Overall I love Fantastic Factories. I was so happy to find out that the demo we did wasn’t a fluke and the game is just as straightforward and good as it seemed when we first played it. This is a game I immediately wanted to play again after my first play and then immediately wanted to show off to more people after that.
If you like engine building even just a tiny little bit, you need to pick up Fantastic Factories. It’s a super tight, easy to learn yet rewarding game where you feel like you’ve built something by the end. It’s also lightning quick and it ends just when things get exciting, leaving you wanting more.
Fantastic Factories will also appeal to the heavier engine building fans as well. People who dig Food Chain Magnate, Ultimate Railroads, or Terraforming Mars, are going to find an enjoyable thinky filler here.
You may also want to check out Fantastic Factories if you’re a solo player. If you do pick it up for solo play, consider getting the playmat as well as one side of it is designed specifically for solo play.
Personally I’m at the point now where I really want to check out the expansions for this game. You all know how much I love asymmetry and I wouldn’t mind adding in some take-that elements as well.
That ends our look at Fantastic Factories from Friendly Skeleton games. This is one of the hot game for us right now. What’s your groups current new hotness? We would love to hear all about it in the comments below.
- Approachable gateway game with simple iconography.
- Easy to learn, 5 minutes to teach.
- High replay value with 40+ unique cards, lots of strategic depth under 1 hour/game.
- Solo mode or up to 5 players
