KLEIN, ABER OHO!

LITTLE FACTORY

Once again we may visit the paradise-like landscape of „little Town“ (Empfehlungsliste „Spiel des Jahres“ 2020). THere we did collect the coveted resources with worker placement mechanism, here all is happening with cards, while wood, stone, wheat, loam & cotton are basically available for free, even - provided they are really available at any given time; more valuable resources, however, need to be acquired by swapping.

Wood turns into planks, loam turns into bricks, cotton provides yarn, easily understood evens and absolutely comparable with the „Hans im Glück“ fairy tale: But, of course, we do not want to end up empty-handed at the end of all the swapping, but work our way up the production chain. The first clou: For some products the card need not be discarded - a sheep simply makes the yarn, and a cow loves to give milk; however, the same cow does not love so much to produce meat or leather (sad but true). The second clou: Cards need to be acquired over their respective production chains, they can also be bought for their alternative value in coins on one or several cards of your choice, so that there is some flexibility involved, albeit with an important restriction: Several cards are only available for buying with one card only!

The third clou: When the card you want is missing from the current display, there is no swapping - which is especially aggravation, when those cards are hoarded by other players, and even intentionally. Because contrary to other games where we collect in parallel and rather a solitary way besides each other, we collect against each other here, provided you keep an eye on the plans of your fellow players. It is nice that this provides more intense, but sometimes also possibly frustrating, interaction.

The final purpose of all that repeated swapping is the acquisition of building cards; happiness or greed about their acquisition, however, should not result in swapping off all your resources cards to make sure that you do not suffer the fate of “Hans im GLück” in the following round. You can take only one basic resource = Level I, yellow  for free, but this loses you speed. On the one hand, building cards provide victory points, on the other hand they offer - as an important bonus - additional optionsd for swapping in addition to the only one main action; some of them even let you “produce” additional victory points. However, the necessary resources for those, meat, bread or milk, go to the discard pile and return to the game with a factor of lateness and are maybe snapped up by another player.

The solo variant is different: Here you play against time, very elegantly implemented by having to discard a building card after each round or having to achieve minimum ten points in 25 turns. For that we have only five of the nine highest-value Level III / purple resources cards, but the return after their use or exchange to the display immediately. For some building combinations - Cow/Sheep to meat combined with Meat to victory points, or cow gives milk combined with milk to victory points - the achieving of the goal is much too easy. For those, you should be sportsmanlike and forfeit the setting-up of the respective victory points buildings.

Little Factory is a somewhat repetitive, tactical card collecting and exchanging game with a simple „engine building“ mechanisn, suited for experienced and frustration tolerant families, teenage age up, or for friends, as well as for experienced frequent players. The cuddly graphic designs provides flair and renders the game very accessible.

Harald Schatzl

Players: 1-4

Age: 10+

Time: 45+

Designer: Shun & Aya Taguchi

Artist: Sabrina Miramon

Publisher: Iello / Hutter Trade 2021

Web: www.hutter-trade.com

Genre: Collect, swap, draft cards

Users: With friends

Special: 1 player

Version: de

Rules: de en fr

In-game text: no

Harald Schatzl: 5

Chance (pink):1

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 1

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 1

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0