Let's take a look at Encyclopedia

Have you played 📔 Encyclopedia?

It has been getting a lot of mentions around here lately, and for a good reason: it is a mesmerizingly beautiful production with a fun theme of studying animals and publishing your findings about them. You use your dice workers 🎲 to gather money and prepare for expeditions, hire experts, pick animals to observe, then go on expeditions to understand their different characteristics. After that you can publish your findings and grow your reputation.

🎲 At its core this is a dice worker placement game with a major set-collection aspect. Over 6 rounds, players draw and roll 4 dice each, which they can use to do actions. You should think of it more as a common dice pool though, as anyone can use any dice, but players get a bonus if theirs get taken. Dice color is important for some actions and less so for others, and generally a higher pip value is always better.

🔥 The two meatiest actions are going on an expedition and publishing. On an expedition you choose a destination and study your animals of that continent. Here you use money and tokens to boost your die pip value (well above 6), then use it to cover up characteristics of your cards with cubes. There are always 4 types of characteristics: class, diet, habitat and climate. Generally you want to pick animals with similar benefits to score more when you publish. There is a fair amount of arithmetics needed here as different types require different pip values, and you pick what you want to study.

🧐 Publishing is quite nuanced, but basically you choose a reference animal and remove cubes from it and potentially other animals too, to get victory points. These characteristics-cubes are also collected in sets on the board for end game bonuses, so you want to specialize in certain things.

💬 Encyclopedia is probably the most nuanced set collection game with many layers, as you carefully choose cards and characteristics and try to do things in an efficient way, while also keeping in mind what dice are available. Luckily there is a fair amount of possibility to mitigate dice rolls, and having a shared pool helps too.