Sprocketforge has a goofy name, and not in a self-aware sort of way, and that’s always a good sign to me (DEATH TO POSTMODERNISM). There have been several notable games about gears turning, namely Tzolk’in and Corrosion, but for my money, this is the one of the better cogwheels you can get smushed in-between (for my money).
METAL GEAR!?
Sprocketforge is a cube pusher, meaning that it’s a game about cleverly acquiring different colors of resource and using them to fulfill contracts for points. The gimmick is that each player has their own player board with 5 plastic gears that are enmeshed. The four gears on the perimeter turn clockwise, while the center gear turns widdershins. In each gear you can nestle a smaller wheel that has resources pictured on it (it’s a hexagon, everything is hexagons). When a side of the interior wheel is pointed toward the bottom, it’s available to be collected through one of the game’s actions.
Actions! There are three of them. You can produce, plan, or petition. When you produce, you collect the resource that’s in each wheel’s active slot. Sometimes there will be an icon, sometimes there will be an actual wooden piece.
Planning is the “take contract” action. You take contract cards that come in three tiers, which will give you points and other rewards. When you fulfil contracts, they go in an exhaust queue at the top of your player board, and the plan action lets you discard two exhausted resources to the supply. This is useful because when your queue gets full, you lose points for each resource you can’t exhaust in the queue.
Petitioning is the most unusual action for a game of this type. There are three petitions at any moment in the game, and each one can be activated if you are within the exhausted resource threshold required to activated, and you have favors (rewards from completing contracts) to spend. These cards will often let you do a little special action and reward you with points. Sprocketforge is a race to 30 points, so these are often highly coveted.
No matter the action you take, you will have the opportunity to fulfil as many contracts as you can at the end of your turn. Then, you rotate all of your gears one hex side. That’s most of the game—except for the follow mechanic.
Modern Times
Sprocketforge continues in the tradition of the best engine builder (Race for the Galaxy, duh) by including a follow mechanic. This follow mechanic isn’t as strategic and interconnected as RftG’s, but it does sometimes encourage you to look at what the other players are doing and plan accordingly. Every action includes a slightly less-good version as its associated follow action.
The game has a very solid flow to it, where you spin the gears in your sprocketforge in Chaplin-esque fashion while belching out mana bits that you have to deal with. Like the best engine builders, it’s less about building a perfectly efficient machine and more about running over the other players with a janky kluge of assembled parts.
There are also asymmetric powers for each player to dive in, though at the time of this review, I haven’t touched those yet, as the game offers plenty of gear twiddling without it.
The game accomplishes what many games do not, which is creating a good clean system that is satisfying to operate, reasonably competitive, and evocative of running some kind of steam powered monstrosity. Sprocketforge is a dorky good time, I recommend.
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