by Brant Guillory, 16 February 2023 ~ #UnboxingDay
A Kickstarter success story, City of the Great Machine raised over $100k in November of 2021 for the campaign, with a projected delivery in November of 2022. It arrived here in February of 2023, so a few months late. There’s a lot in this package.
Here’s the entire Kickstarter pile, which includes the base game, 2 expansions, a Kickstarter exclusive bonus to one of the expansions, and a set of ‘alternative’ minis.
click images to enlarge
Here’s the base game box, with all it’s usual data. The image is definitely a steampunk theme, as befits the game.
Opening the box, there’s a couple of rulebooks and the counters for the game. The punchboards also include a spin-wheel that needs to be assembled.
There are a pair of rulebooks, and they are well-illustrated with clear, if dense, text, and a lot of examples.
The rest of the base game box is built into a plastic-molded tray with a lot of space for components beyond what comes in the base set. Clearly, the publisher is expecting you to just add new components to this box, but that might not always be possible, as we’ll see.
The figures are in their own removable tray, and tip out right nicely. We’ll come back to them in a bit.
Dice & meeples. The meeples are custom-cut, and are tiny
The city tiles are long rectangles. There are 2 different color backs, and a total of 9 districts
There are a lot of different kinds of cards in this box, as you can tell by the back of the box. The small deck of access cards are separated by character, and have very similar front sides. There are also smaller cards with a ‘boot’ backside and different uses on the front sides.
The medium-sized cards are used for reference cards, events, and the solo-game AI, among other things.
As you can see when these cards are put into their tray, there’s a lot of space to add more.
The large cards include the characters, as well as some additional reference cards.
Comparison of the 3 sizes of cards. The middle size is roughly standard poker-deck sized
The large cards that coordinate with the characters also coordinate with the figures
The figures are unpainted but well-detailed, and the ‘servants’ of the machine are a different color than the ‘heroes’
The Confrontation Kickstarter exclusives pack includes a sealed envelope you’re not supposed to open
The Escalation expansion includes an airship, as well as a new several new heroes
There’s also a set of Kickstarter exclusives just for the The Escalation expansion
Finally, the Stand-In Heroes swap into the base game and give you a greater range of options. You can see that the book tells you which specific heroes to swap them in for.
Now, here’s the caveat – no idea at all how this plays. It sure does look cool, but I’ve not played it, demo’ed it, or even watched a video on it online. We’ll let you know what we learn.
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UNBOX THE BOX SO YOU CAN REBOX THE UNBOX
