Session Report: Jambo and Factory Manager

Had a chance to play Jambo Monday night. It's a two player card game involving buying and selling wares for $. There are also a variety of cards that help you build and engine to get and sell the wares you need to make a profit - some allow spelunking the deck for demand cards, others cycle cards, others trade cards for wares or vice versa, some trade wares for wares of another type, some trade money for wares, and so on. Your objective is to have the most money.

You need to play a game to see the cards to get a feel for what is possible. The game ends when someone has $60, but the other guy gets a turn and may snatch victory from the person ending the game. I got to $52, then had a bit of very bad luck with a card auction (I drew three cards, the package of which would constitute a possible net gain of about $41 minus purchase price to my foe and which did virtually nothing for me.... but once they were out there, it was necessary to bid high to prevent him getting them).

So, some cards can be pretty swingy under the right/wrong circumstances, but if I hadn't played the offending card and drawn demand cards my opponent was most ready to fill, I think I'd have won, even with a smaller market stand (he drew most of the auxilliary market add-on cards).

Worth another play anyway. More depth than Lost Cities, longer to play, maybe more fun or maybe not.

Then we played Factory Manager, from the Power Grid folks. This is a game about growing your factory's capabilities (more units of output, more and better automation, energy and manpower management) through purchases of better robots, better machines, power management systems, control rooms, and additional warehouse space. Meanwhile, the prices of energy rise and your turn-by-turn income will tend to as well (as you increase warehouse and industrial output).

It is interesting because the energy rate of increase is a bit hard to predict, some of the most expensive systems you can buy late in the game may not pay themselves off (Lorry actually had a final turn where the best action for him was to operate as-is with no further changes), and your income is determined by the lesser of your warehousing and your industrial output (so managing this balance is key).

You also have manpower management, to install new machines, to remove old ones, to operate machines (but not robots, power systems, or control rooms), and the available labour pool (unallocated) controls the number of new machines/systems that come available in the progressing market turn-to-turn.

So you have to manage in such a way as to coordinate your output, your power requirements, your manpower usage, the need to keep men free for equipment buying/installing, and do all of this with an eye to profit optimization.

I managed to handily beat the daylights out of my foe as he tried to snatch up all the cheap warehousing. That did mean I had to buy the expensive warehousing, but it has high capacity and doesn't eat up much of your factory space. In the end, the fact he had inefficient systems he needed to demolish (consuming actions) was the death of him.

I do not believe this is a game (in two player, 5 player has a different dynamic) where running the market on a particular type of system ends up being wise. This game is all about dynamic balance and building your own best engine. Don't worry much about the other guy, except for keeping an eye on the systems he puts into the market for purchase.

The other dimension is initiative is bid upon with available labour from the pool. First initiative buys first from the market. Later initiatives may get cost discounts when shopping. So figuring out where you want to go (especially in multi-player) is an interesting dilemna.

It seems to be a well thought out game capable of being played in about 90 minutes (the 60 minutes they claim is optimistic). It probably takes 15 minutes to setup though.