Sprocketforge Review

Sprocketforge is a cog-nitve and tactile delight, but just like real factory work, it is not one for anyone looking for a relaxing time. 

How to Play

In Sprocketforge, you play as rival factions of gnome factory workers, aiming to gain the most renown in the city. Each player gets a factory board with five cog wheel gears, where enchantment tiles are housed. These give mana when activated, or other benefits. Each turn a player takes one of three actions: produce - gain the mana or abilities on the active sectors of your enchanted gears, plan - gain order cards, or petition - discard favour to gain benefits from one of the noble houses. All the other players are able to take a follow action on your turn as well, which depends on the action that you take. 

To gain renown and other benefits such as new enchantments or favour, you must complete orders using the mana from your mana pool, which you collect when you produce. Beware! When you use mana to complete orders, it goes to your exhaust, and if you don’t stay on top of your pollution, you’ll lose renown and some houses won’t let you petition them. 

The game ends when someone reaches 30 renown, but they may not be the winner. As everyone gets a final turn, and collected favour grants extra renown, just because you finish first, doesn’t mean you’ll win the game.

A Well-oiled Machine

Sprocketforge is very heavy on strategy. You have to think many moves ahead, and orders that seem simple to complete often aren’t. For example, completing orders that need four of a kind seem easy but as you only have five gears, each of which only has one potentially mana-producing sector at a time, these can actually be really difficult and need a lot of forethought to figure out. To make matters trickier, one gear turns in the opposite direction to the others so you have to think in multiple dimensions. This all creates a very engaging puzzle-like game that rewards smart thinking and forward planning.

With that amount of strategy, you’ll likely be waiting a while between turns whilst everyone thinks about their approach and figures out their next moves. To combat this problem, Sprocketforge has a clever “follow” action that everybody can take during other people’s turns which allows everyone to constantly be playing to some degree, so the boredom between turns can’t last too long. It also adds another dimension to the strategy, as this action’s ability depends on what that person did, which may or may not be useful towards your own aims.

The winning mechanic is also a fun one. With the end of the game tied to your renown, rather than some other resource which isn’t linked to your score, it can seem almost inevitable that the person who reaches 30 renown first is going to be the winner. Often it is that person, but when scores in a game are close, it can be really exciting to overtake someone who seems certain to win by hoarding favour cards until the end and sailing past them at the last moment.

The gear turning mechanism is a very unique mechanic, and it is a sensory delight to turn one, and watch the rest move in synchrony. It helps immerse you in the world of a factory, rather than just gaining cards and moving pieces around a board. The shaped wooden mana pieces also feel nice to use and are perfectly sized for the different places that they need to go.

Sprocketforge only has one direct player interaction, where you can recycle mana from someone else’s exhaust. The lack of player interaction can feel a little isolating, but given the large amount of strategy work needed to play, having more player interaction than follow actions and recycling would be a step too far with how much there is to think about. Concentrating on your own board and maybe having some unexpected bonuses from other people is enough. 

A Spanner in the Works

The extensive strategy needed in Sprocketforge is a double edged sword. Whilst the need for future planning and crafty thinking is rewarding, it can also be extremely tiring. My head has genuinely hurt after playing this game on occasion with all the thinking I needed to do! Sprocketforge is definitely not a game for a relaxing evening after work. You’ll need to dedicate some well-rested and active time to really gain the benefits from playing this game, and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for the casual gamer, unless they are looking to graduate to hardcore board games.

Sprocketforge also isn’t particularly forgiving if you make a mistake either, which is almost inevitable with the strategy needed. If you’re one mana short of your plan, because you had accidentally thought the middle gear would turn the other direction, or if someone removes a mana from an exhaust you were planning on recycling, you’ll be waiting a long time for the gears to turn around back to that position again.  

Sprocketforge: A Cog-nitive Delight or just Grinding my Gears?

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