Fantastic Factories — Family friendly fun for everyone

Fantastic Factories is a light tableau building card game with dice. Players first have a market phase, where they get to draft a card. Then, all players can simultaneously roll their dice and run their factory. Whoever can build and run the best factory will win by collecting the most points.

The market phase lets each player take one face up card, knowing what they are getting. Most cards drawn during the game through other means will be at random. Alternatively, they can get a one time use specialist with a powerful ability.

All of the main gameplay happens during the work phase. Each player rolls 4 dice and gets to use them to run their factory. Everyone has a headquarters board with three actions that are always available, allowing them to either draw cards or produce resources. Producing and spending resources efficiently is what Fantastic Factories is all about.

Any number of cards can be played during the work phase by paying the cost. This cost will be an amount of power and/or metal. In addition, every card is one of five types. In order to play a card, you must discard a card of the same type. This has players often looking for pairs of card types in order to be able to play one. It also helps to direct newer players towards what cards to draft.

You can activate each card in your tableau once per turn. Many of them require dice of specific values to activate. Others just require spending resources. Cards have abilities ranging from producing resources more efficiently than your headquarters to manipulating dice to producing goods. The two ways of getting victory points are producing goods and playing cards with prestige values.

With both goods and prestige being worth victory points, players can adjust their strategy between making and running an efficient factory and playing many high prestige cards. Simultaneous turns make for very little downtime in this fast paced and fun card game. And if you want to add more complexity, there are expansions to do just that!