Does Furnace with the Interbellum still deliver the essential experiences of the base game but with more steely cold resolve? Find out as BJ looks at all of the upgrades to the gameplay.
Stop me if you have heard this one before. We are playing at Anubis, our regular Wednesday game night, and I have schemed out a nifty little move for my next turn. The player on my right — let’s call him Logan for pretend — casually places a piece down on the very spot I had planned to play.
Argh! I shout as if in anger. But there’s a silly little grin on my face at the same time.
Just what is it about certain board games that are both frustrating and fun at the same time? Why do we gain perverse joy from walking headlong into the handle of a rake in front of our peers? I have no clue. But, I love those moments just the same.
Furnace, published here in the States by Arcane Wonders and designed by Ivan Lashin is one such game. Lashin is already on our list of underappreciated designers, because he makes games with quick turns and excruciating decisions. They are games that take familiar mechanics — Concordia’s card play in Aquatica, or the network economics in Smartphone Inc. — but tweak them and turn them and twist them into something that feels fresh.
Sure, Furnace is the perfect smack-the-sidewalk-and-everyone-laugh type of game. But what if Lashin revisited it, and added more stuff? Would it lose that icy touch?
Furnace Interbellum is the new expansion for Furnace that came out in 2022 that the publisher was kind enough to send our way. The original Furnace only accommodated four budding industrialists, hell bent on dominating a 19th century capitalistic setting for their own gain (and to win the game). Players used bidding tokens marked from one to four to grab cards for a tableau to run at the end of each of four rounds. (The rule of four returns, Carlos!) The player who builds up the best engine that quickly and efficiently turns stuff into money wins.
Furnace was simple, intuitive, and had only a few quirky rules: (a) you can never place more than one of your bids on the same card nor could you ever place a bid on a card with the exact same number; and (b) if you won the bid, you got the card for your tableau, but if you lost the bid, you received “compensation” in the form of small actions that were multiplied by the strength of your losing bid. What a concept! Players could bid three, for instance, for a card that had a compensation of two coal, and if you were the highest non-winner, you received six coal! The game became a mini-game of chicken, where players dared each other to outbid them for cards that they may or may not have really wanted in their tableau.
At its core, Interbellum does not mess with that winning formula.
Sure, it adds one more player, a set of gorgeous green tokens that make the game playable with five. But since there are only four* bids per player (*I’ll get to that in a second), and the engines are run simultaneously, adding one more player adds only a few minutes to the game length. In our last game, I hardly noticed the difference, and let’s face it, more players means more cards and more opportunities to wreck another player’s plans.
Sure, Interbellum adds more starting cards and industrialist choices. And yes, they throw in a few dozen more construction cards to bid on. But the good news is that all of these additions are just a smidge bit higher in terms of rules overhead, and even then, it’s really not that much more complex. Any experienced player can easily handle what the new expansion does, and the opportunities for even better combos can be found all over the new cards.
Sure, Interbellum throws in a brand new addition, a set of Business Classes cards that give the winning bidder access to Manager tokens. There are six difference business classes available on three double-sided cards, and they pin up at the end of the market. Each card gives you some sweet compensation if you lose, which is multiplied by your losing bid just as if you were bidding on a construction card. But if you win — hey ho! — you take home a Management token that you keep the rest of the game.
The Management tokens all have little game breaking powers that can be moved around from card to card in your tableau each round. It’s so satisfying to find the perfect token to bid on, even if it gives your opponent a choice of compensation. Putting the token on the perfect construction card is even better. But maybe the top experience is seeing the look on your opponent’s face when you outbid them for the ONE TOKEN that they REALLY WANTED that round. We throw around a lot of capital letters at our game nights playing this game, for sure. But, not to worry, the tokens and classes are very tiny additions, almost in the vein of Jonny Pac modules, and again, experienced gamers will have no issues with the tokens at all.
And sure, it does add a new bidding mechanic, based on the coal that starts almost all production chains in the first couple of rounds. Now, players have a fifth bidding token to use, but this one comes in a dial that looks straight out of the Unmatched system. The base value of the dial for most players is a lowly zero, but if you spend extra coal from your inventory, you can boost the value of the dial by the amount of coal you spend. Oh, how delicious that can be! A player can squat down on a pile of coal like the famous firedrake in Beowulf, staring down the other players who might dare scarf up a card for cheap under their nose.
Well, I guess with all of those “sures” listed above that Interbellum adds more than I was thinking it does. But as you can see, all of these are minor touch ups to the game, little modular expansions that you can pick and choose how to modify your game experience. Personally? We added all of them the first time we even touched the expansion’s game play, and I saw no real uptick in agonizing complexity at all. In fact, it felt like these were all things I would want in every game of Furnace that we played.
On the downside, the translated Russian rule book leaves a lot to be desired, especially in light of the many edge cases that the new rules on the cards have added. A game like this, involving bidding and construction and production and the timing of it all, really needed a good rulebook editor, and unfortunately this rule book leaves out important information regarding some pretty common questions that have come up in every game.
One of the players at Anubis this week who tried out Interbellum said that the coal aspect of the dial bidding mechanic did take away a little of the visible aspect of the bids in the base game. In other words, players will get used to just quickly glancing at the other players’ stack of bids to see in an instant what bids the other players have. The production team in the original game had the brilliant stroke to design four bidding chips in various sizes that can easily stack for better identification. The bidding dial takes that away and relies on the players knowledge of each other opponent’s coal stash.
But, the rest of us did not see this as a negative. In fact, all of us agreed that we enjoyed puzzling out each round the mystery of “just how much sweet coal money will Logan put down to get that card from me this time?” Good times.
The verdict? Furnace with the Interbellum expansion still delivers the essential experiences of the base game. You still get the pleasure of building an engine and running it as efficiently as possible. You will still get that cold chill of anticipation as you wait for your turn to bid, hoping that someone doesn’t put the same size chip you were planning to play on the card you really wanted to affect. And you can still put your opponents on ice by freezing them out of the card they really want.
Furnace Interbellum is Furnace+ in my book, and I don’t see any reason not to add the modules any time we play. Just remember to button up your coat tightly next time you play.
Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler!
— BJ from Board Game Gumbo
** A complimentary copy was provided by the publisher. **