Category: Video Games

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.

Furnace

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.

Century

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.

Splendor

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.

Wingspan

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

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.

Anachrony

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.

Underwater Cities

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.

It’s a Wonderful World

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.

Race for the Galaxy

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.

Tapestry

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!)

Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios Group has pledged to sign a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with its unionized workers…though the signing itself won’t happen for another year.

Avalanche Studios employees first began contract bargaining with management last fall, following a history of collective action at the studio, but many of them had been union members for much longer. Union membership in Sweden is a bit different than United States union membership. In Sweden, most workers are allowed to join a trade union that represents their line of work at any time. Union members receive some benefits automatically, such as unemployment insurance and career advice, regardless of whether or not others in their workplace have joined that union.

As a result, union membership in Sweden is high (around 70% of the country), and the unions are able to influence national laws governing minimum wage, sick leave, and other working conditions. But employees can also elect to form a union “club” within individual workplaces, and if enough members join, they can choose to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement directly with their company that offers further protections.

Avalanche Studios Group Union chairman Love Arvidsson tells me despite the popularity of unions in Sweden, the games industry in the country is running a bit behind on adopting them. But it’s starting to catch up. Last October, over 100 developers at Avalanche Studios announced that they had formed a union club at the company through Swedish union Unionen. Other employees similarly had joined a different union, Sveriges Ingenjörer (Engineers of Sweden). Together, the group asked to bargain with Avalanche management over a collective agreement that would grant them even more rights and protections in the workplace. Avalanche accepted, becoming a part of employer organization Almega, and negotiations between all involved groups have been ongoing since then.

Many of the benefits of such a contract, Arvidsson says, are what you might expect: there’s a good pension increase, improvements to sick pay and parental pay, and others. And both Arvidsson and Avalanche confirmed to IGN that a number of the benefits in the CBA are ones the company already offers, or very close to them. But the most important benefit for many at Avalanche is something called co-determination. Essentially, this forces Avalanche management to negotiate certain organizational changes with the union before making them, such as the appointment of new executives, large layoffs, and others. Additionally, the union gets at least one seat on the Avalanche board of directors, voting power and all. Essentially, it gives the workers of Avalanche a meaningful and legally protected voice in how their company is run.

This voice is especially critical to Avalanche workers because of the environment that led them to unionize in the first place. Arvidsson explains that the workers felt there had been “various systemic issues” at Avalanche that had created, over time, dissatisfaction with management.

“It’s more like a series of small things and some big things, where there’s been a general feeling that management has not felt compelled to listen to and take into account the feelings and the opinions of the employees, and we didn’t really see that improving,” Arvidsson says. “That feedback was also given to management. And management, a lot of the time, had the response of, ‘Our doors are open, just come and talk to us whenever you want.’ And a lot of people were like, ‘We did come and talk to you and you didn’t do anything, so this relationship is not working.’

“So I think that was the main reason, we decided if they’re not going to voluntarily listen to the workers, then we will organize, and then they will legally be forced to listen to us, because we’ll have that legally-protected influence in the company.”

Agreement, Deferred

After several months of negotiations, the union’s negotiations with Avalanche have been successful. Mostly.

As Arvidsson explains, the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that Avalanche is being asked to sign onto isn’t an outlandish one. In fact, it’s a standard bargaining agreement that numerous other companies and unions agree to, with the option to additionally sign a local bargaining agreement at a later date that includes more specific provisions. But Avalanche has been taking its time deciding whether or not to sign it, and Arvidsson says he walked into negotiations on April 10 unsure whether or not he’d have to organize a strike. Fortunately, he didn’t, but he didn’t walk out with a signed contract, either. The good news for workers is that Avalanche has committed to signing the CBA.

“As a Swedish-founded company, Avalanche’s values are well-aligned with the Nordic model, wherein CBAs provide a longstanding framework for constructive relations between employers and employees,” said Petra Skoglund, interim chief HR officer at Avalanche, in a statement to IGN. “We consider this step a natural progression in our growth journey. Over the past years, we’ve made significant strides toward making Avalanche one of the best workplaces in the gaming industry. Entering negotiations to implement a CBA in Sweden underscores our commitment to this goal. We’re dedicated to being an exciting yet stable employer for top gaming talent everywhere we operate – and for Sweden, this path made sense to us.”

The bad news is that the company wants to wait until Q2 of 2025 to do it.

Per Skoglund, the reasons for wanting to hold off are largely administrative. Because CBAs are so general and cover multiple companies, they typically have a validity period between one to three years, after which they are renegotiated for everyone. Currently, they are smack in the middle of one of those periods. Avalanche wants to enter the agreement at the start of the next validity period rather than entering now, and immediately changing the agreement a year later.

“The time frame allows us to have a dialogue with Avalanchers about what it means to be covered by a CBA,” says Skoglund. “Our leaders, in particular, will receive training to ensure they are set up to succeed, and the many Avalanchers in Sweden who have international backgrounds (some 40 countries are represented just in Stockholm and Malmö!) may be unfamiliar with the Swedish CBA model. We see this time frame as a great opportunity to bring everyone up to speed.”

In our conversation, Arvidsson acknowledges Avalanche’s reasoning has some merit to it. Because of Swedish laws and the content of the CBA, he continues, it does take some work to set up the internal systems needed to comply with what Avalanche is about to sign, and gaming companies especially can be less equipped to handle that due to the industry’s overall lack of union experience. But Arvidsson adds that he’d normally expect to wait a few months, maybe half a year – a full year is a long time to hold off such an agreement, and says the workers are “disappointed” that Avalanche wants to delay it this long.

“It’s not great. It would’ve been better if they had committed to signing earlier and then if they felt that they needed some time for transitionary stuff, like they weren’t sure that they would be able to comply with the agreement properly, we could just all agree to chill,” he says. “Because we’re going to be learning as well. It’s not like we know how to do all of this stuff, either.”

Filled With Co-Determination

On the bright side, Avalanche has made other concessions that take effect now. The company has committed to acting as if it is bound to participate in co-determination, and has promised to negotiate with the union and allow the workers to be more involved in various internal processes. “It would be better if they were legally bound to this, because at the end of the day, this is the thing that they’re saying,” Arvidsson says. “It’s noted in an official protocol and it’s something that they have committed to, but it is not something that they are legally bound to comply with. But it’s better than nothing.”

It’s a major step forward for Avalanche, which has had at least one studio-shaking issue in the past few years where workers expressed deep dissatisfaction with the lack of company transparency. Skoglund acknowledges that the company had room to improve after that inflection point, and asserts that giving employees a legally-recognized voice is just one part of that.

“The union club members have confirmed that it’s one of their main priorities and we welcome their commitment, as this is one of the ways we can improve as a company and employer,” Skoglund says. “The Swedish CBA framework provides standardized ways to exercise employee influence, which we hope will contribute toward making Avalanche one of the best workplaces in the games industry.”

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a wacky puzzle of a game, full of secrets and interactions that were still surprising players weeks after launch. And while it seems like most of its major twists have already been uncovered, one player claims they’ve found an obscure Dragon’s Dogma 2 secret that’s taking them to previously unexplored parts of the game’s map.

Warning: Massive Dragon’s Dogma 2 ending spoilers follow. Do not scroll down if you do not want to know about the entire premise of the game’s final hours. Seriously, we’re just going to spoil the crap out of it!

LAST CHANCE! BIG SPOILERS STARTING….now.

In the final hours of Dragon’s Dogma 2’s “true” ending, players are transported to a bizarre place known as the “Unmoored World.” There, an advancing red fog representative of the murderous Brine slowly creeps across the land, consuming more and more of the map until either the player stops it or the game ends. Players already have some wild theories about what’s going on with the Unmoored World, the characters in it, and what’s really happening here. But it all got weirder a few days ago, when someone seemingly managed to walk into the red fog and explore what lies beyond, unscathed.

Reddit user Temporary-Class3803 claims in a post to the Dragon’s Dogma 2 subreddit that they’ve found a way to safely traverse the red fog. Per their post, they were initially just exploring theories on how to reverse the fog’s encroachment, something that is currently thought impossible. But while they were experimenting, they found an area where Capcom seemingly forgot to code in the “Brine consumes you now” functionality, allowing them to just walk into the giant fog sea and wander around.

Here are Temporary-Class3803’s instructions on how to find the precise spot:

To get into the red mist in that location, start at Seafloor Shrine. You’ll need a staff to use the levitate skill from mage/sorcerer.

At Seafloor, begin by looking East of the portcrystal and jumping up the side wall in between the vendor area and the vocation guild.

Once you get to the top, you’ll float over to the far wall and take an immediate right, stopping at the tower. Once at the tower, hop off of the wall to the land below, and take another immediate right, follow the edges of the cloud southward and eventually you’ll get to a point where the Brine doesn’t try to eat you.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like you can actually do much in the big cloud of fog. The Unmoored World is effectively a mirror of the real one in most ways, with the red fog starting where the ocean used to be and slowly eating up the map. As a result, most of what’s inside the fog cloud just seems to be…nothing. They report trying to walk to Melve and being unable to do so without Brine eventually consuming them.

Still, even if all this just seems to be an unintended goof, Temporary-Class3803 is continuing their exploration in hopes of finding more secrets in the Unmoored World. They’re digging into lore, examining the many strange, caved in archways around the continent and pouring over notes and lines left by the Harve Village hermit, looking for unfound secrets.

Even if it’s unlikely their search turns up any fruit at this stage, the hunt itself has other Redditors curious about secrets, lore, and the potential for either cut content or future DLC content. The primary running theory at the moment (which Temporary-Class3803 is trying to dig into) is that there might be something to do in the Unmoored World with a number of mysterious, caved-in archways dotted around the map. It’s been pointed out that at least a few of these archways are only accessible in the Unmoored World, but so far, no one’s been able to figure out what they’re for. Could they be entrances to a secret dungeon? Possible DLC content? Triggers for another ending? Even if Temporary-Class3803’s exploration into the red fog itself is unrelated, their stumbling into it triggered a number of individuals to give the archways a second look. If there’s a secret to be found there, the community is on the case.

There has already been plenty to find in Dragon’s Dogma 2, arches or otherwise. Players are still working out exactly how the mysterious, village-murdering disease Dragonsplague works, and it took weeks for the internet to realize that catapults could be used to uncover secret areas. More recently, players figured out that Capcom has a built-in system for making sure everyone’s Pawn gets hired sometimes. And others are making incredible mods to customize Dragon’s Dogma 2, such as creating Dragonsplague warnings, silencing chatty Pawns, and obtaining unlimited teleportation.