The brilliance of Nucleum
In our previous post about ☢️Nucleum I quickly went into how good the action selection is. You have these two-sided action tiles 📏 that you can either place above your player board, doing both actions (and then claim them back later on a Recharge turn), or play them as part of a railway on the main board, only triggering actions where there is a color match on the edges (you lose these tiles forever and also need a worker to mark it as your own). I think the inherent satisfaction of matching up domino-halves plays a big role in why it's so fun to select actions like this. 😊 Then there is variety, as you keep needing to restock on these tiles, and you will have slightly different actions in various combinations available throughout the game.
The fun doesn’t stop there though. 😉 Players each start out with an asymmetric tech tree, and you can unlock these one by one as rewards for doing specific things. 💡 These are pretty powerful ongoing effects or one-time abilities. Additionally, constructing turbines and mines also unlocks bonuses, and one of these is an asymmetric one specific to you. So as the game goes on your actions become better and stronger. 💪
Another cool implementation is how objective tiles work. 📝 One of the actions allows you to draft yourself objective tiles, so you can pick whatever matches your strategy more. Whenever you take a tile you have to put it in one of the available empty spots on your player board and claim the associated bonus! Once you complete a goal, it is then removed so its slot becomes available again. 🧐 Cunningly linking together these short-term goals to build up to your end-game plans is an engaging mini-game that is essential to play effectively.
💬 While the game is quite heavy, I don’t find it too exhausting to play. 🙂 I think if you are on the fence about the difficulty, you should give it a go. You can quickly learn the rules and get into a flow - even if some turns might induce some analysis paralysis, drafting and playing action tiles becomes second nature soon.
