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Jesse Dean
United States
Orlando
Florida
Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious predator on Earth!
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The Manhattan Project, by Minion Games, is a worker placement game thematically centered on the race for the development of the first atomic bomb. Players recruit scientists, engineers, and laborers that allow them to perform the actions required to gather the materials required to perform this weapon testing. The first player that is able to achieve the appropriate victory point threshold by developing and testing bombs is the winner.
Time To Place The Workers!
Mechanically the game has a lot of similarities to worker placement that have come before it, but with enough thematic innovations to make it seem fairly fresh. The most interesting bit is how turns are handled. Unlike many other worker placement games, there are not specific worker placement rounds and recovery rounds. The game moves along on at a continual pace, with players taking turns consecutively in clockwise order. On a player’s turn they are able to either place one worker on the central buildings and any number of their own personal buildings or they may return all of their workers, all contract (one-shot) workers, and all workers on their buildings to their respective owners. This creates a rather interesting tension between whether you try to restrict other player’s options by slowly filling spaces on the central board and take less advantage of your own buildings or make a quick turn-around where you place and recover your workers in a, rapid alternating fashion. I imagine that in play it will mostly be somewhere in-between, but the possibilities of those extremes is, in itself, interesting.
The game has three kinds of workers (laborers, scientists, and engineers), each of which are allowed to perform the sort of actions you would expect for their types: laborers can only perform the most generic actions, engineers are effective at mining and building things, and scientists are able to convert yellowcake into plutonium or enrich uranium. One thing that differentiates this game from others of its type is how easy it is to get more workers. Getting 3 more laborers requires just a simple action, and the University buildings allow you to get multiple scientists or engineers at a time. There is a counter limit for each player, but if they exceed this they are allowed to use single-use contractors. This abundance is made up for by the fact that many buildings and the most valuable bombs require multiple workers to use. So how many workers you have and how you use them is going to vary widely based on the quantity and types of buildings that player is using pursue victory.
Interaction For Fun And Profit
The Manhattan Project features four major areas of interaction. The first two types are the same sort of interactions that you see in many worker placement games while the other two are a bit more unique. The first item is type the normal exclusivity of action spaces. By taking a particular action, no one else can place a worker there. In addition, there are a number of spaces that when you take an action all other players also get a similar, but lesser, bonus. Usually there are multiple options for these actions, including ones that are costlier but don’t provide a communal bonus, forcing players to decide which of the two costs is worse.
The first more unique style of interaction is of the direct kind and is represented by the ability of players to attack each other’s buildings. Two resources are available for this: fighters and bombers. Fighters are used to defend a player’s buildings (you cannot be bombed while you have fighters) and attack enemy bombers and fighters while bombers are used to attack enemy buildings. Using either of these items for an attack uses them up, so it is possible that by launching an attack you will leave yourself open for a counter-bombing. The bombing itself makes a building “damaged” and unusable until the repair action is taken. This creates an interesting arms race dynamic that makes it so most players are only forced to really invest in bombers and fighters once someone else does. Determining targets of air strikes is also the only part of the game that explicitly allows negotiation, so different players can coordinate their attacks on one person that looks like they are going to end up winning. I am not sure how pivotal this will end up being to the game, and how much it will really slow down the leader, but I expect it will be quite interesting to find out!
The second style, espionage, is more indirect. By taking the espionage action you are able to, for a cost, place an increasing number of your own workers on other player’s buildings, both providing yourself with additional options while also blocking your opponent’s from using their own buildings without spending their placement action to recall workers. This looks like it might even be more damaging then the air strikes, as it prevents them from using any of their own buildings until they spend a round recalling workers.
Race For The Bomb
The only way to get victory points in the game is to test bombs using cards gained from the Design Bombs action. Everyone gets a bomb card when this is taken, but the person who actually performs the action gets the benefits of first choice of cards as well as an extra card after all of the players have picked. The big advantage that taking this advantage has is that it will allow you to focus your bomb-making attempts on a particular style, allowing you to reduce your need for either uranium enrichment plants or plutonium reactors and perhaps gain access to multiples of the same style of bomb if your opponents aren’t able to figure out which card you pick. This appears to be the only part of the game where information is kept secret, so it is possible that opponents (besides the one to your immediate left) will not be able to successfully identify the sort of bombs you are focusing on until you start to commit to a particular path by purchasing buildings that allow you to more efficiently produce resources required for that path.
Conclusion
While this isn’t the most innovative coming out this Fall it has enough interesting things going on that I am looking forward to exploring it and finding out if it is a game that will ultimately have a long-term place in my collection. The fact that the art is gorgeous is simply an added bonus. This is the only game I’ve supported on Kickstarter to date and I look forward to getting my copy in November.
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Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious predator on Earth!
