Reviewed by Chris Kovac
CARNEGIE (Tesla Games/Quined Games, 2 to 4 players, ages 12 and up, 3 to 4 hours; $160)
Carnegie is a two to four player worker placement and resource management game where you are a 19th century captain of industry who is trying to be as great a philanthropist as Andrew Carnegie. This is a heavy gamers game designed by Xavier Georges.
Carnegie requires a fair bit of setup. First, you create a “timeline board” by randomly selecting four out of eight timelines, putting them together, then locking each end with the start and end tile of the timeline track. This board will chart the twenty turns of the game. Department tiles are sorted by type with four sets of departments discarded back to the box. These tiles will not be used in the game. The other department tiles can be purchased by the players during the game to enhance their company. Goods cubes and money tokens are placed next to the board.
Each player gets a player board showing five beginning departments as well as four goods cubes, twelve dollars, four industry tabs (which you slide under the right side of the board as marked except for the starting spot of each tab), employee meeples and player disks of their color (and one action choice tile if playing a four-player game).
The main board itself is divided into a number of spaces. The top part of the board has the donation spaces where, for a set amount of money during the game, you can buy additional ways to score points. Below it is a map of the USA divided into four regions (West, Midwest, East and South), each with a number of city spaces to build projects on (project type is denoted by a symbol) and a transportation track for each region with a space at the end of each transportation to place employees who go on missions. This will all be discussed later on in the review. You place four of the player disks on each of the starting spaces of the regional transportation tracks (West, Midwest, East and South), one disk on the start space of the scoring track and one on the starting spaces of the project tabs (housing, commerce, industry and public infrastructure) on the right side on your board except public infrastructure. The rest are part of a player’s general supply.
You take ten of your twenty meeples and place five laying down on the lobby space of your player board and then one standing on a workstation space for each of your five starting departments. It should be noted that standing employees indicate that they are active and can be used for a department’s action while those lying down are inactive and cannot be used for a department’s actions (more on this later). Then each player can move any combination of his laying down meeples to any space on his player board including empty spaces. They remain lying down in the new spaces. Finally, a start player is chosen, getting the first player and timeline marker. Beginning with the start player, each player takes their housing project disk from the appropriate space and places it on one of the four major cities housing project spaces.
The start player chooses one of the department rows to advance by marking it with the timeline marker. When you advance to a space first, an event takes place depending on the symbol of the space. One type of event is “contribute” where you can pay an increasing amount of money per donation (each contribution costs more than the last based on a table) in order to place one of your player disks on one of the contribution spaces on the main board which will give you extra points at the end of the game. Extra points are gained by having things like certain kinds of projects, having markers in certain areas, having a number of a certain kind of resources etc. at the end of the game. The other kind of event is “take income”.
In a “take income” event, a player can take one or more of his employees from the mission space of the listed area on the event space and return it to their lobby space on their player board. For each player he returns home from the region listed on the event, he gets the reward based on how far he has advanced his player marker on that region’s transportation track. Also, for each completed project on his project tabs, he receives any income listed on the bottom of that space. After the event has been resolved, in player turn order, departments of the row on which the timeline marker advance. During this phase, a player can use his one-shot action tile to use a different set of departments. The types of actions departments allow varies but falls into one of the four listed categories which are from top to bottom:
Human Resources – These types of departments allow you to move employees to various departments on your player board or to empty spaces on your player board in anticipation of future departments being built there. Any moved employees are placed inactive (lying down).
Management – Acquire good cubes, money or construct new departments on your player board.
Construction – Build projects developed through research and development departments by placing completed research project disks from your project tabs on the appropriately marked spaces on the playing board of your choice.
Research and Development – Research new projects on the various project tabs on the side of your player board by spending research points and various numbers of goods cubes from the various research and development departments to place a player disk on the next space of a project’s tab or spend resource cubes to advance your marker along the transportation tracks in the various areas.
It should be noted that each department has one to three workstations and can be used only if an employee is active (standing up in the space). Also, after an action is done, some departments require the employee there to be sent on a mission to the main board which means that employee meeple is placed on a location mission space of the players choice.
Once a player has completed all of his department’s actions for the turn, he may pay the workstation cost to stand up any meeples in the department space which allows them to be used to run that department’s actions in a future turn. When all players have completed running their departments, the first player marker and timeline marker are given to the next player in clockwise order. The current action is marked off in the timeline track and a new turn starts.
When all twenty of the spaces on the timeline track have been chosen, the game ends and a final scoring takes place. You will get a combination of points from having an unused action disk, active employees, the highest floor of your department on your corporation board, points from project tabs, points for having a series of projects connecting two or more of the four major cities on the board and having the appropriate advancement on the transportation tracks on the board (based on a victory point table), points from transportation tracks and finally victory points from donation space which you contributed to during the game. The player with the most points wins and there are no tiebreakers.
Carnegie is a complex game which in order to win, you must try to balance developing projects and new departments on your player board with sending employees to the main board project spaces and building projects/advancing on the transportation tracks. All the while, you must try to use your departments efficiently to generate resource cubes and money so you can make donations. Choosing the right combination of departments and being able to operate them efficiently will also help with you win the game. You have to second guess where the next player will move on the timeline track and make sure you have manned departments from all four types ready to be operated to take advantage of an opponent’s choice. This means there are a lot of things to keep track of but this offers great flexibility in gameplay strategy. The rules are well written for a game of this complexity though you might have to read them a second time to understand all the nuances. The game will take four to five hours of playing time but the downtime between turns is relatively short. If you are looking for a medium to heavy weight Euro with minimum theme but innovative game play, this game might be for you. Casual gamers might wish to look elsewhere. A 7.5 out of ten for me. – – – – – – Chris Kovac
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