The Great Exhibition (and more)

We were lucky enough to get to play the prototype of 🖥️ Ada’s Dream last year, so it was clear to us that the game would be amazing. No questions there. 😄 However I didn't know about what other additions might come - and there are some cool smaller modules! 🥳

The most impactful one is the Great Exhibition and its visitors. The Exhibition itself is a separate board holding 4 of these new visitors cards (+ a preprinted one), with slots under each one for visitor meeples.
The meeples correspond to the 4 dice colors. 👉Whenever you draft a die, you can pay coins to also activate the visitor card at the meeple’s position, then the meeple moves, changing the options for following turns.
Taking a wild gray die doesn’t activate a visitor, however you get to move a meeple and claim the bonus from its space instead! 😉

This module really changes up the economy of the game. 🙃 Though in some games I feel starved for coins, in others I have more than I can spend - and this module definitely helps exchange money for useful stuff! It also influences the decisions of what dice to draft and when. 

The rest are smaller but welcome things like new tokens to cover up research track bonuses, universities or public objectives, raising the already great replayability even more. 👍

The workshop where you draft the dice from also gets new optional overlays, but these come with a gameplay twist too. 🧐 Each time you claim a bonus when drafting a die, the token gets flipped, showing another bonus. This makes the drafting mechanic even more involved and dynamic. 🤩

💭All in all, we really love the game, but we also have some nitpicks: 😶 Mainly the readability of the board due to the thin font that fits the theme, but isn't that practical; And some other iconography issues. Small things from the prototype that could have been simple to rectify. I also think that using white for the screen printed meeples consistently would look better, but that’s totally subjective of course.

To turn back to a more positive note, those issues are totally overshadowed by the engaging gameplay and clever mechanics! Ada’s Dream is a superb euro, and I'm convinced it will be a big hit! 😁