Board Gaming - Innovation

Innovation

While I was in Melbourne on my recent travels, I had another chance to play this game. It's a fun little engine building game, where you get to do 2 actions on your turn. Initially they are likely to be Meld and either the action on the card you Melded or Draw. As the game progresses, you build up a collection of cards in front of you that consists of a pile of each of the 5 colours of innovations.

^{10 piles of unknown new innovations that get progressively 'better' and 5 wonders to achieve. Out of shot there is also a pile of achievement cards to purchase.}

The aim of the game is to be the first player with 5 achievements or wonders. To do this, you need to score points so that you can spend them on the achievements, or you need to match the conditions of the wonder to be awarded it. Each of the purchased achievements cost 5 times the stack value, and there is one from each stack arranged in ascending order so the first one costs 5 points, then 10, and so on.

Part of the engine building from playing (melding) the different cards to the table in front of you is to be able to use the actions on them to score cards or draw better cards, or to pilfer innovations from your competitors. There is about 8 different symbols that can appear on the cards, (see the factories on my Machine Tools below) and having more than others allows you to use them. So long as you have more than someone, you can use the action, but anyone with more than you can also do the same action. And they get to do it before you do, which can improve your draw if there is one, but it can also be hazardous if they take what you wanted.

^{Apparently it's an unusual strategy to have such a limited engine (Just my Machine Tools card) but it almost won me the game, and any expansion I tried ended up getting eaten or stolen}

I said mostly cover the cards below them, because there are cards that allow you to 'splay' the stack in one of three directions. While a splayed stack doesn't give you any of the actions from the lower cards, it does uncover some of the symbols depending on the direction of the splay. Once a stack is splayed, it will stay that way, with new cards to it obeying the splay direction.

It's a really nice game, with not too long a play time (under an hour). There are many ways to get to victory, and while one player was looking like running away with it in our game, I was right behind him and the other player wasn't too far back. Because of the nature of playing cards on top of others, sometimes an engine that was working stops suddenly because the symbols that were powering it no longer exist, and the new replacement might need another card to actually be a better engine than what it's replacing.

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^{Upgoats made by the talented @ryivhnn}