Engine building is an amorphous genre of board games in which you acquire resources that you spend on things that will net you more resources. At some point, you’ll start to convert resources into whatever the game’s victory condition is, turning it into a race to get the best score. Often there’s a whole lot of extra mechanics attached to this basic framework in order to make the game richer and more strategic.
Given the rather wide-ranging nature of this definition, it can be hard to pin down what an engine building game is: after all, war games where you capture territory could qualify! But as the famous saying goes, engine building is something you’ll know when you see it, particularly in the subset of games that put it front and center among their mechanics. And among those, there’s a smaller subset of the very best that we’ve picked out for recommendation.
Why not start with an engine-building title that involves building near-literal engines? In Furnace, you’re magnates during the Industrial Revolution, bidding in an auction to gain machines and businesses to add to your growing empire. The purpose of these is to either generate the game’s basic resources or to take those resources and process them into higher-level products with the aim of creating a sort of production line that eventually spits out money, which serve as victory points. It’s a fascinating setup, with the auction providing the sort of tension and interaction that these kinds of games are often lacking, while the production line brings a new dimension to the way you have to build your engine.
Engine-building games include some of the most complex and intense titles in strategy gaming. But the concept itself is straightforward and there are some excellent entry-level engine games that are suitable for the whole family. Century: Spice Road is perhaps the best. Everyone starts with two cards, one which gives them basic spices and another that lets you upgrade a spice for a more valuable one. There’s a selection of cards available to buy that let you do more complex variations of these two actions, feeding in certain spice combinations to get more valuable ones in exchange. Players are aiming to get card combos that feed into one another, snowballing chains that result in more and more valuable spices at each step in a race to afford the most valuable victory point cards. If the faux-historical theme doesn’t do it for you, there’s a fantasy version with gorgeous art.
Another family-weight engine builder, Splendor casts the players as jewellers, trying to make the most impressive pieces from a range of gems. On your turn, you can either pick up some of the delightful poker chips that represent different types of gem, or spend them to get a jewellery card from a face-up display. Once gained, jewellery cards also act as permanent gems to help you in future purchases, and this is the fuel that powers your engine, allowing you to afford bigger and better cards which will, eventually, be worth victory points. It’s a simple setup that hides a surprising amount of angst as you wait to see if you’ll get the cards you want before other players, and even if those cards are as valuable to your growing engine as you hope. The game plays perfectly well with two, but there’s a strategically richer two-player version available called Splendor Duel.
Million-selling hit Wingspan earns its place on this list through the wide appeal of its ecological bird sanctuary theme. It might seem a strange subject for an engine-building game, but the structure is there: each time you add a bird to a habitat the rewards of that habitat in terms of food, eggs and bird cards, get stronger and most birds have a special power that’s activated as part of that same step. So, the more birds you have, the easier it is to get the resources to play even more birds. Purists might find that the game ends just as the engine you’re building gets complex enough to be interesting, and it’s true that part of your strategic focus is on racing to be first on each round’s scoring criteria, but you can’t argue with the beautiful art, the variety and those million-plus copies sold.
Res Arcana is a bizarre game that feels like it shouldn’t work. Players, representing wizards racing to gain magical power, get dealt or draft a random selection of cards depicting random spells, minions and artefacts. Many of them give you access to additional resources to play more cards or, as the game progresses, grab some victory points. There’s no way that such a slapdash collection of cards ought to synergise well enough to make an engine and yet, they do. The onus is on you to try and figure out how your hodgepodge collection of magical minions will best synergise to put you ahead in the sprint for magical power. It’s never anything less than a fascinating puzzle which, as the race enters its final stages, becomes surprisingly exciting with a plethora of additional powers including limited player interaction.
However complex an engine-builder might be, they all operate on the same basic principle of using resources to buy things that get you even more resources. But Anachrony has a genuinely fresh, thematic twist: in a sci-fi setting with time travel, what if you could borrow those resources from your future selves? Doing so will let you get a step-up on your competitors as you prepare to escape a global disaster but fail to pay them back in time, and you’ll be hit with instability penalties. The game builds a demanding framework around this concept, challenging you to recruit workers and score points from a variety of sources as you research and build futuristic technologies to power your game engine.
Another sci-fi take on engines, Underwater Cities has you constructing, well, cities underwater in the near future. There’s a novel colour-matching mechanism whereby you can send your workers to any space to take the action there, but if that space is the same colour as the card you spend to take the action, you also get the card effect. This forces you to work with the cards you’ve been dealt, prioritizing effectively to try and get an edge over the competition. The engine is based around industrial plants that you can build around your developing cities, which fire into production at various points in the game, boosting your efforts to colonise the undersea before your opponents by using the game’s rich and satisfying palette of strategic options.
The Wonderful World you’ll be building isn’t a feelgood winter narrative, but a near-future Earth in which you’re governing a new state. Your raw materials are a draft of cards from which you’ll be selecting likely candidates to slot into your engine to generate resources and points. Some you’ll start building, others you can recycle for the resources they’ll cost, but you’ll need a plan because the turn unfolds in phases, each of which generates a particular resource type, so long as you’ve got a building that creates it. This combination of draft and staged building offers a lot of crunch for relatively few rules, especially with a huge stack of cards in which you can hunt for synergies on your way to build a powerful, satisfying nation-state.
This perennially popular sci-fi card game is an early example of the “following” mechanic, where each player picks a type of action and everyone gets to do it, in this case with a small bonus to the picking player. Early on, you’ll mostly be playing alien worlds and technology upgrades, which are the starting fuel for the engine you’re going to develop over the course of the game. Unusually, cards themselves are a key resource which you pay to put other cards into play, although some of your worlds will also produce goods that will feed into your growing machine. There are a lot of tricky synergies to manage between the tableau you’re building and the phases you’re picking, ensuring you’ll stay engrossed in a very varied diet of strategy until your stellar empire-engine is churning out tech and settling worlds at a satisfying rate.
While there are other games on this list that wear a civilization theme, Tapestry is the only one that really evokes that narrative in any detail. You’ll take actions each turn which, as well as providing the resources typical of engine building games, can net you exploration tiles to build the map, city pieces and military units you can fight on the map with. Your engine is based on uncovering. Tapestry’s other draw is the staggering variety of different ways you can build your engine, with different civilizations offering differing starting points, unfolding through the titular “tapestry” cards and bonuses you can get through climbing the four advancement tracks, making sure every game offers brand-new challenges to explore.
For more, check out our roundups of the best 4-player board games, and if you're in the market for a deal see our best cheap board games roundup.
Matt Thrower is a contributing freelance board game and video game writer for IGN. (Board, video, all sorts of games!)
