Door 3

Behind Door 3 of our MechanXmas calendar hides deck- and pool building. For this one we chose ☕ Obsession! The first reason: Obsession is an amazing game and one of our most thematic ones that we love dearly. 🥰 It is played in Victorian-era England, as you try to improve the social standing of your noble family and your estate. We backed it all-in during Kickstarter, which is among our best decisions ever made. 😅

👉Second reason: deck-building plays a major role in the game. As your social circle grows and you get to know more and more people of the gentry, you get new cards - people you can invite for future social gatherings.
There is also your staff-pool in the game that you can expand. These workers are essential to fulfil tasks you need done, tend to guests and help host all kinds of events.

So while Obsession is not a deck-building game in the sense of Dominion for example - you don’t shuffle and draw cards, it’s more of a hand-management - I think it is indeed a very suitable candidate. 💪

Each turn you can host an event, meaning you choose one of your estate tiles. It has a meeple requirement to do, and it shows how many and what kind of people you can invite. Inviting the correct people is also an interesting choice every time. They could give you money, reputation or new gentry cards you can add, all of which are very important. ☝️

Used workers are exhausted for a turn, which will of course also influence your decisions. You can buy new tiles for your estate every turn - common and private objectives will help steer your decisions. Another clever idea is that hosting a tile causes you to flip it, so it usually gives more victory points. This means organizing new kinds of events every time is more lucrative, and it also means you cannot specialize your pool of workers and guests and keep re-using them.

The expansion ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ really takes this game to eleven, introducing more things and most importantly four new kinds of service staff. 🤩

I could write so much about this game, but for now this has to do. 😅🥰