It’s hard not to think about Potion Explosion, another marble-loving c-c-c-combo game released by CMON in 2015. But in spite of a few structural familiarities, the two games couldn’t be more different. No, to understand where Gizmos fits in to the grand evolutionary tabletop tree, we have to take a closer look at how its gears spin. The end of the game is triggered when a player builds their 4th Level 3 Gizmo or their 16th Gizmo total (including their Starting Gizmo). Once that happens, play continues until the player to the right of the First Player completes their turn. That is, until all players have had an equal number of turns in the game. If the player who triggered the end of the game is the player to the right of the First Player, then the game ends when they complete their turn.

Two players who already know the rules can likely crush a game of Gizmos in less than half an hour. Even with four players, I don’t think I ever had a game take more than an hour. Research – Allows you to take cards from one of the Gizmo piles up to your research level and build or file one of them. The Great Science Fair approaches! You, the brilliant minds of our generation, will compete to build the most creative and powerful Gizmos in your homemade labs. Can you master the four energies and construct the best combos to bring home the first-place prize? Even though it has similarities to games like Splendor and the Century series, Gizmos almost feels like its own take on engine-building, thanks to the wild chain reactions. My favourite aspect is the sense of progression you gain as you collect gizmos and develop more opportunities for combos, trying to determine how you can maximize the efficiency of each turn. Some of the design choices I prefer less than other engine-builders, but the way Gizmos makes you feel as things ramp up and your turns sprawl into several actions at once is about as good as it gets. If you look at what you can do on your first turn compared to your last turn, it doesn’t even feel like the same game. Car Parts and Accessories, Bike Parts and Accessories, Helmets and other Protective Gear, Vehicle Electronics 30 Days Returnable

The Player Turn

After you draw the cards, choose 1 of them and either Build it (if you have enough Energy) or File it (if you have space in your Archive). Or you can choose to do neither. Remember to always replenish the Display Area when you Build a Gizmo from there. After replenishing, your Build action is over. Each player takes a Starting Gizmo Card and places it on their Player Dashboard below the File symbol C. The area below the Player Dashboard is the Active Gizmo Area. Pet Habitats and Supplies, Apparel and Leashes, Training and Behavior Aids, Toys, Aquarium Supplies such as Pumps, Filters and Lights 15 Days Returnable

You start with a research level of three, a storage level of five and a archive limit of one. These can be upgraded through Gizmos and to win you are going to want to upgrade once or twice. Reactor cards let you do all sorts of things like take more marbles, gain victory points, build more Gizmos and so on. When some one has built four level three Gizmos or a total of 16 the round plays out and scores are totted up from built Gizmos and earned victory points. The secret of master inventors is building their Gizmos in a way that will cause chain reactions, with one Gizmo triggering another to generate the most benefits! The Effect of one Gizmo may be a different action than the one originally performed. So, when you then perform that secondary action, it may trigger other Gizmos, and so on. Choose 1 Energy from the 6 available in the Energy Row to add it to your Energy Storage Ring. Your Energy Storage Ring has a limited amount of Energy it can hold, as indicated in your Player Dashboard’s Upgrades Area. Each player starts the game with a Storage Limit of 5, but some Upgrade Gizmos will increase that number. Your Ring can never hold more Energy than your Energy Storage Limit, so if you are at your limit, you cannot take any more Energy, not even to replace existing ones. After a few plays, I was looking for a little more variety in the level 1 and 2 gizmo cards. I don’t doubt Phil Walker-Harding’s game design here, in terms of balance and what made most sense for the game. However, when you look through all the level 3 gizmos, you can’t help but wonder if there might have been a way to incorporate a little more variety into the cheaper gizmos as well. I suppose that’s part of the fun and reward of building your engine, though, as you strive for those one-of-a-kind, specialty level 3 gizmos.Gizmos is an engine building resource management game. You will start with simple turns consisting of a single action while building your engine up to the point where you can trigger many actions per turn.

Regular readers of Geeky Hobbies will probably be having a sense of deja vu at this point as Gizmos probably sounds a lot like Wingspan which I reviewed recently. While the two game’s themes couldn’t be much different, the two games actually share quite a bit in common. In both games you are acquiring cards that you try to use to set up chain reactions to be able to take advantage of more actions. The games share a lot in common but are not exactly the same. Gizmos seems to let you set up larger chain reactions and is probably the simpler game overall. I would probably say that Wingspan is slightly better though as there are more strategic options in the game. I would probably say that Gizmos is more accessible though and would probably work better as a family game. Both are great games though that I had a lot of fun with and I would highly recommend both games.The key to doing well in Gizmos is taking advantage of the effects on your cards. When you perform actions in the game you may have the ability to activate the abilities of the gizmo cards that you had previously built. Therefore whenever you perform an action you need to look under the corresponding section of your dashboard to see if it triggered any of your card’s effects. When a card’s effect is triggered you can take advantage of its ability at any time during your current turn. You may only use the ability on each card once each turn though even if it is triggered multiple times. A card’s ability can be activated on the turn that it is played but only if it is activated by something other than the card itself being played. The gameplay is simple to learn but about half way through your first play you suddenly realise that you need to build your Gizmos carefully to trigger off as many combinations as possible. Gizmos take the shape of square cards that can be upgrades, converters, or what I call reactors. Upgrades do just that; giving you more storage for marbles and to reserve Gizmos in your archive, converters allow you to change marble colours or quantity.