Engine building is an amorphous genre of board games in which you acquire resources that you spend on things that will net you more resources. At some point, you’ll start to convert resources into whatever the game’s victory condition is, turning it into a race to get the best score. Often there’s a whole lot of extra mechanics attached to this basic framework in order to make the game richer and more strategic.
Given the rather wide-ranging nature of this definition, it can be hard to pin down what an engine building game is: after all, war games where you capture territory could qualify! But as the famous saying goes, engine building is something you’ll know when you see it, particularly in the subset of games that put it front and center among their mechanics. And among those, there’s a smaller subset of the very best that we’ve picked out for recommendation.
TL;DR: The Best Engine-Building Board Games
- Viticulture
- Fantastic Factories
- Scythe
- Daybreak
- Apiary
- Furnace
- Century
- Splendor
- Wingspan
- Res Arcana
- Underwater Cities
- Race for the Galaxy
- Tapestry
Viticulture
Many engine building games are pretty abstract but Viticulture, in which you'll slowly building up a functioning vinyard, acquiring fields, planting grapes and maturing bottles in your cellar, is a notable exception. The process of grape to glass is realistic and strangely satisfying to build and improve through your actions, while being managed by fairly accessible rules that still present a good challenge for more seasoned gamers to master. And to pop the champagne cork, it's a wrapped in widely appealing theme with lovely art.
Fantastic Factories
In Fantastic Factories, everyone starts with the same headquarters card, to which you can assign your rolled dice, based on their values, to gain resources. However, you also start with two random blueprint cards for additional machines you can build, and you'll gain more during play. The idea is to combine blueprints in different formats to create the most effecient engine for translating dice rolls into points, and the number of different ways the game leverages simple rules to create fun and inventive combos for you to try out is mind-boggling, making this a very family-friendly entry in what can be a fairly weighty genre.
Scythe
Looking at Scythe’s fantastic production and artwork, depicting dieselpunk mechs ravaging agricultural landscapes, you might be forgiven for thinking this is a wargame. And while you can indeed go and stamp on your opponent’s mechs, you’d better have built a damn fine engine to replace your losses and supply your troops first if you don’t want to be left to the mercies of more careful and strategic players. Rather, most of the game involves carefully curating an economy by spreading your workers and buildings around to maximise the returns of your actions better than your competitors. Then you can go and stamp on them, at least a little bit.
Daybreak
Daybreak, which won last year's prestigious Kennerspiel des Jahres prize, is noteworthy for two reasons. Firstly, cooperative engine-building games are rare but that's exactly what this is, encouraging players to work together to take on its considerable strategic challenges. Second, it tackles the important theme of climate change in a positive way, showing how collaboration and investment offers a realistic chance of combating the threat to our environment, if we take it seriously. That's all baked into the game's model, as you try to ramp up your technological, strategic engine to diffuse global heating before it reaches a critical tipping out.
Apiary
Although this game of highly-evolved insects spreading their wings into outer space is a fashionable mish-mash of different genres, there's still an engine at the heart of it as you build and upgrade your hive to give you more and more options to gain and convert the resources you'll need to power your intergalactic exploration. This is tricky thanks to a classic tight economy with many competing demands. And in a fascinating twist, many in-game actions benefit if you take them in tandem with another player, giving the game a unique blend of both competition and cooperation, as we discussed in our Apiary review.
Furnace
There really ought to be more engine-building games about building actual engines, but Furnace, comes closing, casting you as magnates during the Industrial Revolution, bidding in an auction to gain machines and businesses to add to your growing empire. The purpose of these is to either generate the game’s basic resources or to take those resources and process them into higher-level products with the aim of creating a sort of production line that eventually spits out money, which serve as victory points. It’s a fascinating setup, with the auction providing the sort of tension and interaction that these kinds of games are often lacking, while the production line brings a new dimension to the way you have to build your engine.
Century: Spice Road
Engine-building games include some of the most complex and intense titles in strategy gaming. But the concept itself is straightforward and there are some excellent entry-level engine games that are suitable for the whole family. Century: Spice Road is perhaps the best. Everyone starts with two cards, one which gives them basic spices and another that lets you upgrade a spice for a more valuable one. There’s a selection of cards available to buy that let you do more complex variations of these two actions, feeding in certain spice combinations to get more valuable ones in exchange. Players are aiming to get card combos that feed into one another, snowballing chains that result in more and more valuable spices at each step in a race to afford the most valuable victory point cards. If the faux-historical theme doesn’t do it for you, there’s a fantasy version with gorgeous art.
Splendor
Another family-weight engine builder, Splendor casts the players as jewellers, trying to make the most impressive pieces from a range of gems. On your turn, you can either pick up some of the delightful poker chips that represent different types of gem, or spend them to get a jewellery card from a face-up display. Once gained, jewellery cards also act as permanent gems to help you in future purchases, and this is the fuel that powers your engine, allowing you to afford bigger and better cards which will, eventually, be worth victory points. It’s a simple setup that hides a surprising amount of angst as you wait to see if you’ll get the cards you want before other players, and even if those cards are as valuable to your growing engine as you hope. The game plays perfectly well with two, but there’s a strategically richer two-player version available called Splendor Duel.
Wingspan
Million-selling hit Wingspan earns its place on this list through the wide appeal of its ecological bird sanctuary theme. It might seem a strange subject for an engine-building game, but the structure is there: each time you add a bird to a habitat the rewards of that habitat in terms of food, eggs and bird cards, get stronger and most birds have a special power that’s activated as part of that same step. So, the more birds you have, the easier it is to get the resources to play even more birds. Purists might find that the game ends just as the engine you’re building gets complex enough to be interesting, and it’s true that part of your strategic focus is on racing to be first on each round’s scoring criteria, but you can’t argue with the beautiful art, the variety and those million-plus copies sold. It now has a sequel, which adds a slew of new mechanisms and swaps birds for dragons: Wyrmspan.
Res Arcana Board Game
Res Arcana is a bizarre game that feels like it shouldn’t work. Players, representing wizards racing to gain magical power, get dealt or draft a random selection of cards depicting random spells, minions and artefacts. Many of them give you access to additional resources to play more cards or, as the game progresses, grab some victory points. There’s no way that such a slapdash collection of cards ought to synergise well enough to make an engine and yet, they do. The onus is on you to try and figure out how your hodgepodge collection of magical minions will best synergise to put you ahead in the sprint for magical power. It’s never anything less than a fascinating puzzle which, as the race enters its final stages, becomes surprisingly exciting with a plethora of additional powers including limited player interaction.
Underwater Cities
Another sci-fi take on engines, Underwater Cities has you constructing, well, cities underwater in the near future. There’s a novel colour-matching mechanism whereby you can send your workers to any space to take the action there, but if that space is the same colour as the card you spend to take the action, you also get the card effect. This forces you to work with the cards you’ve been dealt, prioritizing effectively to try and get an edge over the competition. The engine is based around industrial plants that you can build around your developing cities, which fire into production at various points in the game, boosting your efforts to colonise the undersea before your opponents by using the game’s rich and satisfying palette of strategic options.
Race for the Galaxy
This perennially popular sci-fi card game is an early example of the “following” mechanic, where each player picks a type of action and everyone gets to do it, in this case with a small bonus to the picking player. Early on, you’ll mostly be playing alien worlds and technology upgrades, which are the starting fuel for the engine you’re going to develop over the course of the game. Unusually, cards themselves are a key resource which you pay to put other cards into play, although some of your worlds will also produce goods that will feed into your growing machine. There are a lot of tricky synergies to manage between the tableau you’re building and the phases you’re picking, ensuring you’ll stay engrossed in a very varied diet of strategy until your stellar empire-engine is churning out tech and settling worlds at a satisfying rate.
Tapestry
While there are other games on this list that wear a civilization theme, Tapestry is the only one that really evokes that narrative in any detail. You’ll take actions each turn which, as well as providing the resources typical of engine building games, can net you exploration tiles to build the map, city pieces and military units you can fight on the map with. Your engine is based on uncovering. Tapestry’s other draw is the staggering variety of different ways you can build your engine, with different civilizations offering differing starting points, unfolding through the titular “tapestry” cards and bonuses you can get through climbing the four advancement tracks, making sure every game offers brand-new challenges to explore.
For more, check out our roundups of the best 4-player board games, and if you're in the market for a deal see our best cheap board games roundup.
Matt Thrower is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in tabletop games. He's also been published in The Guardian, Dicebreaker and Senet Magazine as well as being the author and co-author of several books on board games. You can reach him on BlueSky at @mattthr.bsky.social.
