Intro to Carnegie

Have you played Carnegie? If you follow our Instagram stories, you might have recently seen a few shots about it already, as we can’t stop playing it right now.
Not only is this a solid euro game 👌, it is certainly also one of the most beautiful ones… but I am biased as I love the clean style of Ian O'Toole.

This game was designed by Xavier Georges and is inspired by Andrew Carnegie, who made his fortune in the United States’ steel industry and became one of the richest men of his time. He was a huge benefactor and philanthropist, and I think this theme comes alive in this game. You start the game out with your small company then start building out different industry projects on the map, conduct research to improve the infrastructure, expand your company with new departments and cleverly send out your workers to earn goods and money - which you can use to donate to different causes. The game has a nice arc as you rise from humble beginnings to greatness.

It is quite a heavy game with the perfect amount of tightness for us. You can kind of get stuck if you make some errors in your planning, and it can feel hard to climb out. However if you do plan well and it all comes together, it feels so satisfying! ☺️

Also, the rulebook itself is not even long, it’s the decision space you have due to the tightly knit elements of the game that make it complex. So I think you can get going pretty easily and have yourself an extra crunchy challenge. Carnegie also uses an awesome system in which everyone performs the same action that the active player selected - which minimizes downtime and also makes for interesting decisions, as you have to watch what the others might want to accomplish. I think I will crown all of this with crazy good replayability due to the randomized action board, departments, donations and (in 2p) blocked spaces - so each game is a new randomly generated puzzle to solve. 😍

Many unique ideas and intricately interwoven mechanics make this game really one-of-a-kind. 🤩 Stay tuned for more, as we definitely want go more into detail about our thoughts!