Just like Wall-E?

In ⚙️Clockworker, humanity has depleted the resources of Earth, and left in search of a new home. It is up to the robots that were left there to go through the heaps of junk in search of valuable things to build up and repair the lost artifacts and create a new era of civilization.

Clockworker is a pretty simple resource management and conversion game with some tricks up its sleeve. 🧐 The unique feature is how you get resources: every turn you will remove the top-most bot from each one of your location cards and get the shown resource. As you get more location cards and supply them with more bots you will get more stuff. You will have to keep sending bots back to empty cards though - also the best spots are usually on the bottom of the card, but you can only fill the spots from top to bottom. So there is always a timer for getting things.

I have to give a special shoutout to the the adorably awesome bot 🤖 figures! 😍

During the game you get cogs which are used to buy new location cards. You will also get more bots which are important to be able to power your growing tableau. Then there are 3 types of resources (and a wild) that are used to either get Recordings that give flat victory points or Artifact cards that give both victory points and some kind of special ability.

💬 You can choose 1 of 6 actions on your turn, but they are easy to remember and you get a nifty player aid too. The problem is that even if your engine is big and you have a lot of resources, you can still only do one thing on your turn, so you are kind of throttled down in a way even though the game is about engine-building. Locations cards become somewhat unimportant after you have a few of them, because they don’t get you point and are hard to refill with bots. The game quickly becomes a race for victory points as you convert resource cubes into recordings and artifacts.

💭 While I would probably not recommend this game for experts, I think it is a cool idea and ideal for newcomers and especially people who enjoy games like Century. The art direction is phenomenal and the idea with the bots on cards is quite unique!