Help Ada Lovelace complete her life's work

In Ada’s Dream, you become an assistant of Ada Lovelace in an alternate history, helping her to build the Analytical Machine, the first computer. To do this you will be using dice to fill up a 3x3 grid, and constructing gears between the dice. You will be studying, getting assignments from Ada, organizing meetings with diverse partners, traveling around in victorian England and giving lectures in different institutes - all in an effort to make the best computer and score more points than your fellow colleagues.

Ada’s Dream is an upcoming competitive mid-heavy euro for 1-4 players. It’s central element is a rondel from which you will be drafting dice, that you can then play on your player board’s 3x3 grid. The main puzzle of the game is to efficiently fill up your board with dice and gears. It makes up a big chunk of your score, as dice values will be added, subtracted or multiplied with each other for each row and column, depending on what types of gears are connecting them. So your Analytical Machine comes alive in a fun way! 😁

On your turn you basically either draft a die or play a die and do an action of the corresponding color. As the game ends when someone plays their 9th die, this means that games will usually last around 18 turns. You can achieve a lot in this time, as you often get to do some bonus or advanced actions, and there is a lot of ways you can gather things.

Drafting dice works in an interesting way. Instead of just taking a die away, you have to choose to move one clockwise and push out another die of equal or lower value, claiming the bonus depending on where it was in the rondel. You generally want dice of high values because they are worth more points, but during drafting you get to play a partner card, which usually require you to take a low value. This is a fun balancing act to get what you need. Partner cards introduce a small deck-building element - however you can only have 8 cards, which means you need to get rid of old cards when taking new ones.

On other turns you will do an action on the main board - but let’s investigate those in more detail in a future post! 😉