Back to the coal (and uranium) face

I first played Nucleum at Airecon a few years back. David brought a prototype with him to the convention, and while I wasn’t allowed to take pictures or know the name of the game, I knew I loved it. Fast-forward a little while and Board&Dice were kind enough to furnish me with a review copy. It was already a given that I knew it’d get a good review, and so it did, as you can read here.

Such is life though, busy with work, home, and reviewing a relentless barrage of games, that it went back on my shelf and sadly gathered dust for a while. Until last week, when a friend of mine accidentally wrote ‘Nucleum’ in Discord while he was trying to find the name of a different game. It made me think about the game, which in turn made me re-learn the game, play it a couple of times with its solo mode, and then take it to my Monday night meet up with folk who like heavier games.

Even though I know I like the games I like, regardless of how long it’s been since I played them, it’s always a nice surprise (for want of a better word) to play them again and remember how good they are. And Nucleum is good!

If you haven’t played Nucleum before, let me give it to you in board game terms. The easiest way is to describe is as something like 70% Brass, 20% Barrage, and 10% something else. It’s a game about building networks between cities, cities where you’ll build buildings, mines and turbines for power stations. Then you use the power from the power stations and mines to power the buildings, scoring points as you go.

Nucleum’s cool twist is that each player has a set of double-ended action tiles. By slotting a tile into the top of your player board, you can carry out both of the actions on it. Neat. The tricky part is that to build the network links (represented by train tracks) you need to put your tiles onto the board. It means there’s a constant need to replace the tiles you’re placing by buying them from the market as one of your actions.

It has some nice interaction between players where you can use other peoples’ links, other peoples’ turbines to get to where you need to get to. There’s a lot going on, but none of it is really hidden from you. Nucleum is cool.

I think I appreciate Nucleum even more now with additional plays under my belt. I appreciate the asynchronicity from the different experiment boards on offer and how they inform the way you want to approach the game. I love that you can advance your own designs while still getting in the way of other people’s plans.

While the games have very little in common with each other, Nucleum keeps making me think about Gaia Project. It’s another of those games where leaning into your faction’s goals is imperative to do well, but when players are all playing well the games are still super close. One person is trying to get tiles down as railway links like it’s going out of fashion, someone else is building everywhere they can, and someone else is pushing uranium through power stations as if they want to power the whole world.

There’s still a ton of overlap, but everyone has their own machinations. You all need tiles. You all need contracts to fulfil. You all need to keep those income tracks bumping along. Even though your ultimate goals are different, the scores can still be so close. The more you play the more you appreciate how the initial randomised board state influences the whole game. It’s one of those games I can see myself playing 20, 50, 100 more times and still getting a kick out of.

Have you played Nucleum? What did you think of it? Do you still play it?

Have you had other games do the same thing for you? A game you loved that you put back on the shelf, only to blow the dust off months or years later and rekindle your affair with? Which game was it?

Also, on a personal note, thanks for reading me here on my new newsletter home on Beehiiv. I’ve migrated away from another place and hope I can settle here.

Adam