The most hyped game recently is...
Weather Machine. We saw this game posted many times already and it just looks so magnificent. 🤩 It is hard to resist, and ultimately we couldn’t… even though Lacerda games aren’t always hits in our household. 🙈 My favorite thing about his games are the unique themes - and of course let's not forget the top-shelf Eagle Gryphon quality and Ian O'Toole art. 😍
You work as scientists together with Professor Lativ. You have created a machine capable of controlling the weather. 🌧️ It shows promise, but also has a fatal flaw: with each successful experiment, something else on the planet gets worse. Time is running out and you have to create a new and better prototype to repair what damage has been done, and stop the Earth from becoming unlivable! ☠️
To address this problem you will be visiting the 4️⃣ areas of the board:
📦 On the bottom you have the Supply, where you can get the main things needed for other actions: Bots and Chemicals. Cogs play an important role too, but those can only be acquired through other effects. A nice touch is how storage space is limited, so you have to keep expanding your Workshop.
🎩 On the left you have the Government, who can help to fund your research. Basically you can activate or obtain Subsidy tiles, that either grant resources or bonus actions.
🧪 In the middle you have the Lab. You can send bots here to participate in experiments. This is perhaps more of a “co-op” part, as you want others to join too, or else the experiments might not even run. You can also publish your findings if you have collected sets of research tokens for a given weather type (you will get those upon taking actions).
🔬 Lastly there is Research & Development on the right side, where you apply your findings in practice, correcting weather patterns. Bots stationed here will make breakthroughs cheaper to achieve - however opponents might get victory points for their bots during your action.
💬 The game is a little bit on rails (at least 2p) as you need to visit certain actions to be able to do other actions, but it's not as strict as Kanban EV felt for us. We like Weather Machine so far and will return with more thoughts on the gameplay soon! 🙃
