Crisis

EvEvanstar5.9

Crisis is an extremely tight worker placement game where everyone places their meeples, and then you resolve the board in number order. The general idea of the game is the city is in a financial crisis, and an outside government has placed austerity measures. What this works out to in game terms is that players have an ever-increasing victory point goal they have to try and meet each round. At the end of the round, you tally who was above and who was below the goal, and adjust the city's well-being marker up or down. Aside from other players always taking the worker spots you absolutely needed, the tricky part of this is players are trying to create resource production chains and hire workers, and investing in your engine tends to eat your score in the short term to pay off in the long term. If too many players make deep investments like this in the same round(s), the game might prematurely end if the city well-being craters below 0. In this case, the money the players had been working toward getting is valueless, and only players who made the VP check threshold are eligible to win. This does have the potential to make the game end anticlimactically in the first few turns, but it also adds some tension. The engine building element is very compelling. You need to buy factory cards that synergize with each other, and also have the workers to run them. Different workers of types matching the icons on the factory can slot in to increase the factory's output. You also can't chain resources generated in the same turn, so keeping some cushion of goods on-hand in the hopes of getting future factories and then having what to run them on that same turn can be crucial, which isn't obvious on a first play of the game. There is a deck of action cards that have different degrees of usefulness, especially at different times in the game. One particular card forces everyone to not use one of their employee tiles, which later in the game you barely care, and early in the game is completely devastating. The card luck was a stumbling block for my group. Overall I really enjoy this game with either 3 or 4 players. It's got a few issues here or there but turns are fast, there's plenty of nice tension about what you'll be able to accomplish on a given round, and the production chain aspect is very satisfying. :star: Art, Iconography and components functional :star: Clever or interesting mechanisms :star: Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players :star: Multiple plays stay interesting :star: Low or mitigatable luck elements :star::star::nostar::nostar::nostar: Raw enjoyment

MCMitchell Cstar4.6

I didn't gel with this game - but would need another play to form a solid opinion.