Flash Review — Weather Machine

Players: 1-4

Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: [unplayed]
Age: 14+
Playtime: 60-150 min
Complexity: 8.5/10

While Professor Lativ’s wondrous invention is successful in controlling local weather phenomena, the machine also causes extreme “butterfly effect” disruptions elsewhere. There is much to do!

A new game by Vital Lacerda is a yearly cause for celebration within my gaming group. The Lisbon-born (Lisborn?) designer has a knack for coming up with heavy games that play like a massive, well-oiled clock: each element interacts superbly with everything else, and all you need to do is figure out how best to pull the levers at your disposal in order to achieve a resounding success.
Ha.

In Weather Machine, players secure government subsidies, expand their workshops, run experiments using Professor Lativ’s machine, build new prototypes to fix the screw-ups caused by those experiments, publish their findings in academic papers, and build cute little robots to help them do it all. (You can even quote previous papers on the same topic to help get yours published. How about that?)

As you can expect with Lacerda, the design reuses some of his mechanical darlings while injecting novelty in other areas. Overall, the game is not that difficult… but it’s a real challenge to learn, and even worse to teach. (God help me.) Hence my 8.5 complexity rating. All I can say is, don’t give up: the end result is well worth the effort. There’s a special satisfaction to be found in seeing all those intricate mechanics come together and WORK. Plus the little gears (even the cardboard ones—I think the metal upgrades are overkill) are just a joy to play with, and the entire package is gorgeous.

For the Lacerda fans out there, Weather Machine feels to me closest to Kanban out of all his previous designs—if that can help push you off the fence.

Sadly I cannot comment on the solitaire module provided with the game, as I have not had a chance to play it yet. But it’s pretty intricate and not for the faint of heart.

Most easily forgotten rule: When you build the prototype (in the R&D department), all of the gears you use must come from the same row in your workshop.

# # #