Furnace Board Game Review – IGN

In the late 1990s, a certain type of title came to dominate board games. Typified by classics like Catan and Carcassonne, they were easy to learn and offered with a great balance of strategy, randomness, and player interaction. As time passed, the former came to dominate the latter two and the games were heavier and drier.

Furnace is very much a return to that previous paradigm, and for many players it is a welcome return. When choosing players as entrepreneurs during the industrial revolution, you will need to buy companies that create a supply chain from which you can get the most benefit. And like many games of this type, it is much more fun than it seems.

Box and what’s inside

Strictly speaking, Furnace is a card game because it has no board. Instead, the box contains some cardboard tokens, pieces of wood to represent oil, coal, and iron, four wooden discs for each player, and some decks of cards. The art is excellent in all components, echoing the technical illustrations of the time in which it is developed. It also has a novel twist tracker that mimics a twist mechanism.

What is not so good is the quality of the card. They are made of a very fine material that wears out quickly, with an annoying texture that makes them stick to each other but not to the table or fingers. They are difficult to handle, but the problem is easily solved with some cheap card sleeves.

Rules and how to play

There are four turns in a Furnace game, each divided into two phases. In the first, some business cards are dealt from the deck and players compete in an auction to win them. In the second, you can activate the companies you own one by one to obtain or exchange resources.

Auctions were another popular feature of late ’90s games, but this one has a smart modern twist. Each player receives four tokens of increasing value and uses them to indicate their offers. The problem is that in Furnace, if you lose an auction, they compensate you, either with raw materials or with the possibility of exchanging some for a different type. You can claim this compensation as many times as your offer token. Often times, that makes losing an auction more valuable than winning it.

This makes the auction phase a relentless, ever-shifting cauldron of competing priorities. Let’s say you want to win a business that can turn coal into cash, which serves as victory points. You can bid high on that, but to use it, you will also need coal on that turn. Therefore, you bid low on a coal business as compensation. But the other players can see this. They can purposely beat you in the cash business while leaving your offer low to win the other card, denying you compensation.

Of course, while it’s tempting to use your offers to screw up other players’ plans, you also need to get your own supply chain up and running. Therefore, it is a constant and multi-directional balancing act to try to win what you need while also getting the necessary compensation and putting a wrench in the jobs of other players at the same time. The stakes are high too – with just four rounds, you must seize every opportunity to win money or you will be quickly left behind.

Although absorbing and challenging, this dance also has a weakness. A good auction game needs a good pace, with offers that increase the excitement. But here, players must bid with great consideration and care, especially in the first two rounds. Waiting while someone aligns the strategies in your head can be a bit frustrating.

In addition to the three main resources, coal, iron, and oil, there is a fourth, more abstract quantity: refresh tokens. Some cards allow you to exchange them for money, but for the most part you want to spend them to improve your business. Each has two effects: one that you can use after purchase, and a second that you can also activate when upgrading. To update, you will need to spend resources along with the token, which makes the update time critical.

As the game progresses, your ultimate goal is to create a chain of cards that allows you to maximize your score. A business that produces coal, another that allows you to trade coal for oil, and a third that can trade oil, the most valuable resource, for money. Having such a chain is not enough, as the exchange effects can only be activated a limited number of times per round. You need a balance, to ensure as many points as possible each turn.

Making this work is the core of the second phase. While it is not as attractive as the auction, it is a little puzzle in itself. Enhanced companies must have their effects in order, with no other activation in between, so the correct order may require some work. More so as the game progresses and its chains become more complex and interdependent. However, it is a head-down activity, without the involvement of other players. That speeds up the game, and the players can do it simultaneously, although that leaves room for individuals to make mistakes in the rules.

Furnace makes those simple rules and three resources work as hard as possible. At the beginning, each player receives a capitalist card with a special power and a unique starting deal. Between them, they provide a variety of guide rails on how you’ll get started building your supply chain. Business cards offer a decent diversity between compensation, resources, and trading effects, but the combinations start to seem sparse after a while.

Where to buy