Tabletop game designers love an industrial theme with exciting inputs like coal, wood, and steel that harken back to the good ‘ol days of the early industrial revolution, with its crowded factory floors and lack of worker protective rights. Julia Thiemann and Christoph Waage decided to break that mold and envision a more futuristic industrial setting for their 2024 game design Algae Inc., where the inputs are, well, algae.
In Algae Inc., 1-4 players are challenged over 60-120 minutes to competitively create such items as bio-fuels, toothpaste, nori, and biodegradable cups as part of four asymmetric departments. I was attracted to the refreshingly unique theme of this title, and I left impressed by the innovative game design.
Gameplay Overview:
In Algae Inc., you have 4 weeks (rounds) in which to prove your managerial excellence and earn the title of “Department of the Month.” Each round consists of five actions chosen from a board where every action is connected to one or two others in a web-like fashion. Players start at one end of the board and then zig-zag their meeple along connected paths on subsequent turns.
Main actions on this board include:
- Hiring employees: choose from operators, engineers, or scientists.
- Activating a machine in your department: each player has three machines that must be separately activated.
- Activate your workers: Pick one of your three worker types, and make them earn their keep.
Activating workers does the following:
Scientists innovate your department. Each of four asymmetric departments starts with a combination of 11-13 common and unique-to-their-department constraints called “science tiles” that each limit efficiency in unique ways. Scientists can remove science tiles and place them on your personal playerboard in a tetris-like fashion.
Your personal playerboard starts mostly covered by engineering tiles, and unless some of these are removed, you’ll run out of room to place science tiles. Your engineers are needed to move engineering tiles to your machine floor to improve the capabilities of your machines in various ways.
Operators help bring new algae inputs into your department’s tanks and sell finished products throughout Europe. In true replication of real-life technology companies, the scientists and engineers lay the groundwork, and the salespeople bring home the points.
Most points in the game come from fulfilling any of 10 public sales contracts of varying difficulty on the map board. The main benefits of fulfilling contracts are points and getting to remove export disks and milestone markers from export tiles on your playerboard. Cleared export tiles provide access to a $1 and 1-point income in between rounds if kept in place. However, if these tiles are removed, they grant players extra game turns.
Gameplay Experience:
This is a game for people who like planning ahead. The web-like action selection system limits which actions are available in any given path and the sequence in which they can be taken, so you’re usually planning 5 turns at once. Timing of actions matters because algae must be processed sequentially through machines A, B, and then C, at which point they become finished products. You likely want to upgrade one or multiple of these machines prior to activation, so algae gets processed more efficiently. And of course, you need to have finished products before you can make a sale. The layout of actions on this board changes each game, as will the optimal path. Importantly, players can use choice tokens to modify the printed actions if they really don’t like their options, but these tokens are limited and must be used wisely.
The most AP-inducing part of this game comes from choosing how to optimally upgrade your department, and this is a completely unique puzzle for each department. You will be eager to remove those constraining science tiles, but which one do you remove first? Improving the utility of your byproducts provides money and energy. Opening up new algae tanks lets you intake more algae and make higher-value products.
You will be equally eager to start adding engineering tiles to your machines, which may let you process more algae at once in each machine, use less energy for various effects, and more. The choice of what to upgrade first can feel agonizing. Should you start with an engineering action or a science action? Maybe you should hire more employees first, since you get more science/engineering done in a single action if you have more scientists/engineers.
It is a truly brain-burning, sometimes painfully tight puzzle that feels completely different depending on the main board set-up, the sales contracts, and which of the four departments you play. The food department needs to worry about its products spoiling if they’re not sold fast enough. The bioplastics department maximizes sale value if it sells both bags and cups in pairs; thus, you need to balance their production. Biofuels only make one product, but it needs to be refined, requiring lots of energy.
Because of the game’s necessity of planning several turns ahead, I’m almost glad that player interaction is minimal, as excessive blocking would be frustrating. There is no blocking on the main action-selection board. There is a small element of one department’s by-products becoming another department’s inputs, but this is mostly symbiotic. The main interaction is on the sales map, as there is a small bonus for being first to sell to any city, as well as a points bonus for being first to achieve any given contract. This game is perfect for two players; I imagine it would also play well solo. Three players is fine, and it allows the sales map to open up more quickly, but four players starts being a bit long. Also, good luck finding a group willing to endure the 40-minute teach and then read a 4-page booklet to learn the nuances for their specific departments.
Also, at any multi-player count, the imbalance of the game is likely to become more apparent. Three of the departments seem fairly balanced, but one does seem to be easier. The bigger issue is the unique nine cards that come with each department. One card is chosen for each game to grant a special on-going departmental power, but the specialness of these powers range from effectively granting a few extra resources during the game (meh), to granting versatility to workers (pretty decent), to effectively granting a player multiple free turns during the game (incredibly strong). While experienced players will generally do better than newbies—both my husband and I more than doubled our initial scores on our second play—a mismatch of card abilities can drastically impact the competitiveness of the game.
One other complaint is that, as challenging as this game is, I don’t think it rewards high-value sales well enough. This is a game where you crawl for the first two rounds, maybe achieving a few low-value sales. It requires a well-upgraded department and ample forward planning to pull off multiple high-value sales. Yet a 6-value sale isn’t inherently worth any more than a 1-point sale; you only earn big points if your sale helps complete one of the sales contracts. I have found myself making a game-end sale with a 5-value product to a 2-value city, because it helped me achieve a better contract, and it felt wasteful despite the point math saying otherwise.
Final Thoughts:
Algae Inc. contains four completely unique gaming puzzles, each requiring multiple plays for mastery. This is a minimally interactive, minimal-luck, heavy Euro with many difficult decisions that strongly encourage forward planning. The game is tight in the first two rounds, but when you do manage your first big, multi-city sale, fulfilling several high-point contracts at once, you feel quite accomplished. High-value sales could be valued more, and some house rules may be required to ensure balance among asymmetric starting card abilities, but this is a well-produced gem with great replayability that stands out as a unique design unlike any I’ve seen before.
Final Score: 3.5 Stars – Four asymmetric departments and variable set-up lend for a uniquely thinky tech-themed puzzle that will be difficult to master.
Hits:
• Innovative design and theming
• Wonderfully asymmetric departments
• Challenging decisions
Misses:
• Some imbalanced cards
• Limitations in some scoring opportunities
