- Publisher : Eagle-Gryphon Games
- Designer : Vital Lacerda
- Artist(s) : Ian O'Toole
- Players : 2–4
- Playing time : 60–150 Min
- Weight BGG : 4.58
What's this?
In Weather Machine, you are scientists on Professor Lativ’s team, manipulating local weather conditions: adjusting precipitation for farms, maintaining wind and clear skies for green energy sources, and adjusting temperature for seaside resorts and sporting events.
The prototype is so far quite effective; however, a pattern has emerged revealing a worrying side effect: each use of the Weather Machine also changes conditions elsewhere on the planet—a “butterfly effect”.
How do you play?
At the very beginning of your turn, you can play grant/objective tiles. Next, you need to move your scientist onto the main board, which is divided into 4 large areas:
🔸The “depot”, where you can change the turn order, buy or sell chemicals, unlock new robots and expand your workshop to store it all.
🔸In “Government”, you can collect grant tiles and research books in exchange for machine wheels, while placing your robots. We will try as much as possible to complete columns to trigger victory points.
🔸Doctor Lativ’s “Laboratory”. One of the actions consists of placing a robot by paying chemicals to participate in different experiments at the end of the round. Each round the experiment will be different and you can plan in advance which one to participate in.
The other possible action will be to publish a scientific article of a type of weather as soon as you have collected enough research books on your personal shelf.
🔸The last area is “Research & Development”. Here you will place your robots and chemicals to recover research books, but above all thanks to the second action you will build a prototype of the weather type of one of your publications, thus allowing you to earn reward tokens and can -even be the Nobel Prize.
To carry out these actions, you will spend coupons which will be earned on the squares and depending on the placement of your opponents. Doctor Lativ will move when you join him in an area and will grant you a bonus coupon.
You will have to move from area to area to collect different resources and robots, in order to try to publish your research and score victory points in various places.
Is it good?
It’s dense, complex and always an intellectual challenge to understand all the strategies in the first few games. As is the case with Lacerda’s games, you will quickly realize that all the actions are ingeniously linked, and you will have to use your brain to plan as much as possible and anticipate several moves in advance.
As for the hardware, it’s always of exceptional quality and looks great, a feature common to all of Lacerda’s games and Ian O’Toole’s artwork. The artistic direction is very reminiscent of that of Trickarion, offering a very pleasant aesthetic.
However, Weather Machine is perhaps one of Lacerda’s games where the theme is less felt. The different areas can feel a bit mechanically abstract, which is a bit of a shame. We don’t really feel like we’re playing scientists.
But in any case, if you are looking for an expert game that requires many plays to master, you can go for it with your eyes closed. It’s a great game!
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Review Weather Machine
Positives
- The artistic direction, the quality of the material and the illustrations, as is usual with Lacerda games.
- A complex expert game that stimulates reflection.
- Interconnected and ingenious mechanics, a frequent characteristic of Lacerda games.
Negatives
- Une thématique qui semble être en retrait par rapport à ses jeux précédents.
- Quelques manipulations un peu laborieuses à effectuer.
Breakdown
- Components and illustrations 9.5
- Mechanics 8.5
- Thematic 7.0
- Replayability 8.5
- Handling 7.5
- Interaction 8.0
- Originality 9.0
