Carnegie

Paul Devlin
Jul 14, 2022
10 min read

Updated: May 11, 2024

A game that is deservedly getting praise for excellent levels of player interactivity and being anything but multiplayer solitaire. But how does that translate to the solo experience? Quite well as it turns out…

Carnegie
Designer: Xavier Georges
Publisher: Quined Games
2022

How to play:

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine your personal player board is a bustling company made up of different departments in which your employees will move around going about their business. The departments where they choose to work fall under the general headings of HR, Management, Construction and Research & Development.

The departments also correspond with one of four actions that are available for you to choose each round from a separate action selection board. Choose to take an HR action? This will trigger all of the employees that are standing in your HR departments and they will do their HR stuff! Choose the Construction action instead and the employees in that corresponding department will get straight to building things. You get the idea – choose the action and the employees in that type of department will trigger.

You’ll more than likely build new departments and populate them with new people as you go through the game but generally speaking the four actions that you choose to take and the departments that will then trigger will let you do the following:

• HR: You get to move your employees around your Company. As the game progresses some of your employees will also be sent out on to the main board – a map of America. They are regularly brought back to the company though and when they are they wait in the lobby to be redeployed. The HR action lets you move them about into and out of departments and ready to be doing more work throughout the game.

• Management: Build new departments in your company ready to be populated by your employees. More departments? Points at the end for building them but more crucially more options for you to take – for example if I have three HR departments then I am going to find the HR action to be a lot better for me than if I only had two. Maybe also grab some cash or resource cubes which will be spent during the game using this management action.

• Construction: Send your employees onto the main board which is split into 4 regions (West, Midwest, East and South) and let them build projects in cities. You’ll get points at the end of the game both for the cities in which you have built as well as a larger amount of points if you have managed to make unbroken connections between the major cities on the board.

• Research and Development: You aren’t going to be able to do that previous Construction action if you haven’t developed your company enough and this R&D action lets you both pull out those snazzy tabs at the side of your player board and add more markers on them which will then be available to you to build more projects in more regions and cities. It also lets you upgrade ‘transport tracks’ - a track in each of the four regions. The more you upgrade the transport tracks the more powerful rewards become available as your employees return from each region.

Choose an action, trigger your employees, do some stuff, get some points. So far, so multiplayer solitaire. But a couple of wonderful wrinkles turn that multiplayer solitaire theory upside down and bring about massive amounts of wonderful interactivity and massive squeezes on the brain…

Firstly, when it’s your turn and you are choosing which action to take, you are not just choosing your action – you are choosing the action that every player will now take that round. So here I am eyeing up an action that I think will be quite good for me, but I look over and see that it’s going to be spectacular for my opponent(s). I better have a rethink then – maybe I will take a less beneficial action instead as I can see that if I do it might not be as good as my first choice but it’s going to be really rubbish for you. Ok let’s take that one instead then. My choice of action becomes crucial not only to the success or failure of my turn, but also the success or failure of everyone elses.

Secondly when choosing an action you indicate your choice by placing a ‘timeline marker’ to the right of your chosen action and at the end of the round you then move the specific action marker to the right once space - just a visual way to keep track of the 20 rounds of the game. BUT WAIT. When I place the timeline marker to the right of my chosen action - down it lands on a randomised space either showing a region of the map, or an icon which lets me make a ‘donation’. So for example, I might decide to take the HR action this round and to the right of it is a space that indicates the East region (or West, Midwest, South – you get the idea). So now if I take the HR action, if I have previously placed any employees in the East region they can come back to my Company and I will also get the Transport Track bonus for each of them. BUT SO WILL THE OTHER PLAYERS IF THEY HAVE ANY WORKERS IN THE EAST. AAAAARGGGGGH. I really want to take that HR action but if I do my opponent is going to get to bring their workers back as well and get lots of juicy cash and resources. I guess I might look to take the Construction action instead this round as it lets me take a worker back from the South region and I am the only person who will benefit from doing that.

If you land on a ‘donations’ space instead you can spend some of your hard earned money to pay for donations - known more universally in the trade as ‘very tasty end game scoring objectives’. They could be ‘2 points at the end for every $5 you have left’, or ‘3 points for number of Management departments you have built’, or ‘2 points for number of projects you built in the Midwest region’. Once the donation is claimed by a player then it’s out of bounds for everyone else – so lots of jostling to try and get the bonuses that you think will get you big points at the end, but also needing to make sure you have the money to pay for them by generally being splendid in the other areas of the game.

Competition too on the main board – “please don’t let the other player build in New York, there is only one space left and if they take it then I can’t build at all there and my masterplan to connect all cities crumbles to dust” as well as a bit of “ha ha, I am going to block them so that they can’t get that spot and make their connections”.

Some small points here and there as the game progresses but mainly you will be scoring the big points at the end for individual cities you built in, how far they were all connected to each other and those donations that you paid for throughout the game.

Solo Headlines:

“Well whoopey-do” I hear you cry. “Really good to hear how interactive this is at multiplayer - sounds like a blast, but I’m a solo player and this is a solo review, surely the solo game can’t feel as interactive?!?”.

I tell you what, it gives it damn good attempt.

At first glance, this looks like a pretty straightforward simple deck of automa cards - flip one over, quickly take its action, it blocks some spaces, removes a couple of things that you might be having your eye on, abstractly gets some of its own points along the way – and so on. Actually, it is all of these things. And the designer could have just left the solo mode at that – left you to do your own thing, make your own points with some minimal automa interference. And you know what, it would have still been a reasonably decent game. A pretty samey solo game to most other Euros out there, but pretty decent all the same.

But absolute credit where it is due - rather than just tacking on a solo mode to a game that is deservedly reaping praise for its interactivity, the designer has given some genuine thought to replicating some of that interactivity within the solo mode.

You see, when I choose to take an action in the solo game – much like in the multiplayer game - my solo opponent Andrew will also have to take that same action. And while I cant see from his face down card what he is specifically going to do dependent on which action I choose - on the reverse of the card I can see a clue as to which of the four main actions he is going to really want to me to take, the one that if I take it is going to be the best for him and score the scoundrel more greasy points. And even more, as I have now drawn his card for this round I can also now see the action that he is going to take next round when it is his turn to choose the action. So now much like in the multiplayer game that action that I really wanted to take I am going to have to think twice about now as that dastardly Andrew would just love it if I chose it. And wait, I can now see what he is thinking of doing the next round – this is interesting food for thought, maybe I should pivot my plans to take this into account…

The difficulty of the solo game can also be increased by swapping out some of Andrews’ cards that give me those clues for ones that tell me nothing. Ones where I have to just keep my fingers crossed and hope he does what I want him to do – much like in the multiplayer game as I would do with a real player and their moves – willing them to do the thing I need them to do and sometimes that gamble paying off!

Andrew also periodically claims donation spaces that you may have had your eye on – but wait a minute, he is now going to score points at the end for how I perform at that donation??!? So for example Andrew might halfway through the game take the donation space ‘score 2 points for every project you build in the West’ – Gulp, I now need to not build heavily in the West, even if I had been thinking about it or even working on it already as he will get those points if I do. PIVOTTTTTTTTTTT.

Solo mode plays in an hour or just less, has minimal, if any, rules exceptions or work involved to run the automa, and is quite the challenge, even on beginner level - but what an absolutely delightful effort that has been made for the solo player here to include them in not just the mechanics of the game but in the feeling of the game. Bravo.

General Headlines:

If it looks like a Euro, feels like Euro, its probably a Euro. This very definitely looks and feels like a Euro. But other than the interactivity, there isn’t anything too different going on here. It feels familiar, safe, it has tracks, I get cubes and money, end game scoring objectives, points for bits of wood that I have placed in places. It’s pretty dry. None of that is a criticism at all. In fact quite the opposite - the thing that made we want the game was that it looked like it would do all of those things that I just love in a Euro. And it does do them all. I guess my point is more that the ‘wow’ here is in the interactivity. Its this that lifts this out of the ‘just another euro’ into ‘a very good Euro’ and this includes the solo mode. The actual game mechanisms are nothing new. The interactivity – even against a lifeless stack of automa cards – is however refreshing.

Not a complaint, more an observation – this is a game that if you wanted to you could easily fall into playing it exactly the same way each time, finding your preferred ways and strategies and just trying to do them over and over again. The game allows this to happen and its not going to hand hold you in to trying new and different techniques – you are going to have to be curious, change your style, try new things, get out of your comfort zone. I can see a lot of people complaining “every game feels the same”. I’d argue that they aren’t trying to play the game differently each time. But it’s a heads up that I think that its going to be easy to fall into lazy patterns on this one.

The game is very tight too and that tightness can sometime feel quite punishing - this isn’t a case of ‘don’t worry I didn’t manage to do those things, but I managed to do some other things and there are lots of points to be had so it all works out either way’. It does not work out either way. Your plan either pans out (give or take some pivots) or you lose. I like taking the knocks, dusting myself and resetting the game and going in for another round. But you’re going to be taking those blows of ‘urgh, that game went really badly for me’ to be getting to the ‘that one went really well’. I don’t think there is an in-between here. And I guess with a game that has interactivity there is also going to be a little bit of ‘take that’ occasionally. Or at least the actions that someone else / the automa takes might inadvertently have pretty rough consequences on your own game which again, might not be to everyone’s tastes – particularly if your preferred style of game is just largely being left to do your own thing and score as many points as you can albeit within certain head squeezing parameters.

All told, this is a really good game, some absolutely excellent effort has been made to make the solo have the same feelings as the multiplayer. Do I think this is a game that is more enjoyable multiplayer? Probably. Do I think this is still an absolutely cracking solo game. Absolutely.

At a glance:

+ This couldn’t scream Euro harder if it tried.

+ Solo mode does a good job of replicating the multiplayer interactivity

+ An easy to manage solo automa, no rules overhead, plays in an hour, good challenge

+/- This is a tight game and can sometimes feel a bit punishing when your plans fall apart

- There are going to be some occasional ‘take that’ moments that might not be to everyone’s personal tastes

- You are going to have to make an effort to not fall into default playing patterns each game – you need to bring the variety to each game, but the variety is certainly there.

Final Score:

8 out of 10 (I’d have probably given it a 7.5 had the solo mode not been so thoughtfully designed to still contain some of the multiplayer interactivity magic. Its general dryness in theme maybe stops me from lifting it to an 8.5)

Reviewed after 11 plays.