More about Carnegie

It’s hard to pinpoint what makes Carnegie such a great game, as there are multiple brilliant elements working in tandem to create a one-of-a-kind experience. In the last days we decided not to pack it away and just kept playing and looking at its beautiful boards 🤩

At the forefront is the action selection itself. As an active player you choose one of the four rows of the action board which determines what income event and what action will happen - however, everyone else gets to follow you, which doesn’t just minimize downtime, but also makes this selection deeply tactical, as you don’t want others to profit more from your turn than yourself.

My favorite part is probably the company board. Each player has one of these that shows your building with different departments where you can perform actions. This is really a game-in-a-game, as you have to send meeples around into different rooms, and have to keep sending them out to missions, to then call them back in certain event phases to provide income. This ebb and flow works so well! 😍 And you get to expand your company with new departments too.

There are 4 actions. When the active player picks one, everyone can activate all of their departments with active meeples that match the action type. These are all masterfully interconnected. In very broad strokes they are:

🙋 HR is about moving your meeple to rooms so they can do actions. This remains always essential, as meeples arrive back into the lobby after an income phase.

🗃️ Management mainly provides you with goods and money to fuel your other actions.

🏗️ Production allows you to place down your project discs on the board, that serve a dual purpose: they raise the income you get when you recall meeple, and there is a route building aspect for scoring!

💻 R&D is used to improve the infrastructure on the board, which again raises possible income, plus you can use this to pull out the project tabs from your company board, making more discs available to place down.

As I said this is just a broad overview, there are many interesting effects of departments, especially if you have the deluxe expansion which doubles the amount of tiles. 🤩