Rock Down to Electric Avenue…
A few years ago, Brass Birmingham became the highest rated board game on the platform BoardGameGeek.com. A game about building industry and connecting via rail lines, may not seem like the moms exciting theme for a game but it is one of the most beloved heavy ‘euros’ out there so it is strange that so few games are strived to do a similar thing. Well, then came along Nucleum, a self confessed love child of Brass Birmingham and Barrage but set in an alternate timeline of nuclear power in Western Europe. Designed by two heavy hitters of heavy euro games, David Turczi and Simone Luciani, Nucleum, from the off, promised to be an exciting prospect.
Together in Electric Dreams…
Thematically we follow Elsa von Frühlingsfeld’s invention that uses uranium to create power. We are told that her device, the Nucleum, “ushered in a new era of energy and prosperity”. We then follow an alternate timeline where Saxony went from a minor regional power to the hub of European science and engineering. This flavour is a nice set up but there is very little of this theme in the actual gameplay. What plays are essential, and simply, doing is building networks to connect their buildings with the factories and fuel in order to power them.
The real heart of the game and the thing that makes it most interesting is the action tiles. Each player will start with a unique faction, giving them a set of research tiles, (powers they can unlock throughout the game), and a starting set of action tiles. On your turn you can choose whether to play the action tile above your play board board and take both actions depicted on it, or place them onto the main board where they become rail lines. The big decision here is, tiles placed off the main board are returned every time you take a rest action, but anything placed as rail is locked for the rest of the game, but they help to build out your neck work across the map. This mechanic alone makes the game worth it. It can be quite easy to place a rail without realising it was your only tile with a specific action, locking you out of that action until you can buy another one. Actions include things like, Urbanise, where you can build different types of buildings onto the map, or you can claim contracts that allow in game scoring, or get more action tiles, or build mines to get uranium. There is a lot of iconography in this game, however the graphic design does a great job of signalling across the boards where each key action relates to.
Rock Down to Electric Avenue…
A few years ago, Brass Birmingham became the highest rated board game on the platform BoardGameGeek.com. A game about building industry and connecting via rail lines, may not seem like the moms exciting theme for a game but it is one of the most beloved heavy ‘euros’ out there so it is strange that so few games are strived to do a similar thing. Well, then came along Nucleum, a self confessed love child of Brass Birmingham and Barrage but set in an alternate timeline of nuclear power in Western Europe. Designed by two heavy hitters of heavy euro games, David Turczi and Simone Luciani, Nucleum, from the off, promised to be an exciting prospect.
Together in Electric Dreams…
Thematically we follow Elsa von Frühlingsfeld’s invention that uses uranium to create power. We are told that her device, the Nucleum, “ushered in a new era of energy and prosperity”. We then follow an alternate timeline where Saxony went from a minor regional power to the hub of European science and engineering. This flavour is a nice set up but there is very little of this theme in the actual gameplay. What plays are essential, and simply, doing is building networks to connect their buildings with the factories and fuel in order to power them.
The real heart of the game and the thing that makes it most interesting is the action tiles. Each player will start with a unique faction, giving them a set of research tiles, (powers they can unlock throughout the game), and a starting set of action tiles. On your turn you can choose whether to play the action tile above your play board board and take both actions depicted on it, or place them onto the main board where they become rail lines. The big decision here is, tiles placed off the main board are returned every time you take a rest action, but anything placed as rail is locked for the rest of the game, but they help to build out your neck work across the map. This mechanic alone makes the game worth it. It can be quite easy to place a rail without realising it was your only tile with a specific action, locking you out of that action until you can buy another one. Actions include things like, Urbanise, where you can build different types of buildings onto the map, or you can claim contracts that allow in game scoring, or get more action tiles, or build mines to get uranium. There is a lot of iconography in this game, however the graphic design does a great job of signalling across the boards where each key action relates to.
The next major part of gameplay is building and then powering your buildings. This is where most of the points will be made but balancing what and where to build is tough! And powering them is even harder. Coal starts cheap but you need more of it and it will go up in cost the more it is used, whereas uranium is hard to build into the infrastructure but if you can then it pays dividends. Then there’s your research tiles that can be unlocked throughout the game. Some ‘one and done’ effects and some ongoing, all of which are great but trying to unlock them all often feels impossible. There is no getting around it, there is a lot going on in Nucleum and the 2 to 4 hour playtime will tell you whether this is your kind of game. But for those who love heavy, strategic puzzles, then Nucleum offers so much to love. Yes it takes up way too much room on the table and yes it is definitely way too fiddly to set up and pack away, but even with all of that I still want to keep going back and back again to see what I could do better.
There is a solo mode in the box, but personally I find it quite clunky, with a lot to manage and find that the game plays best at 3 players. Two doesn’t quite give enough tension and 4 feels a little too long. However at 3 players I can see me playing Nucleum over and over again, and with a good 3D printed insert, the set up has become a lot quicker! So put in the energy and you will be surprised at the spark this game can generate
