• Designers:  Simone Luciani, David Turczi
• Solo Designer:  Turczi
• Artists:  Andreas Resch, Piotr Sokolowski, Zbigniew Umbelter
• Publisher:  Board&Dice
• Developers:  Andrei Novac, Michal Cieslikowski, Kacper Frydrykiewicz, Blazej Kubacki
• Players:  1-4
• Age:  14+
• Duration:  180 minutes
• Times Played:  2
  

One of the ways companies try to tempt you to try a new product is to claim it’s a combination of two things they know you love.  Chocolate and peanut butter?  Yes, please!  Salt and caramel?  Not for me, but most people can’t get enough of it.  A bunch of comic book lovers went crazy when Batman and Superman appeared together.  And if you’re a serious gamer, how about a design which is inspired by two highly rated titles like Brass and Barrage?

Well, I love both those games, so the game with the twin inspirations, Nucleum, was one I was always going to check out.  The designers drew me in as well.  The first is Simone Luciani, and when it comes to meaty games, he has an uninterrupted record of great success dating back to his first significant design (Tzolk’in) back in 2012.  That’s not just according to me, but by the Geek ratings of those games.  The man simply doesn’t miss.  The other designer is David Turczi, who is best known for his solo rules for many, many games.  But he’s also done very well as a multiplayer designer.  The publisher is Board&Dice and they’ve been on a hot streak as well.  So yeah, this is a game I was very interested in trying.  Before I tell you what I think of it, let’s see what’s under the hood.

The backstory of Nucleum is a little reminiscent of the one for Barrage, in that it’s based around a new source of power.  In an alternate history, during the late nineteenth century, a machine that we today would call a nuclear reactor is invented in the German region of Saxony; its creator calls it the Nucleum.  The players are industrialists who are trying to best use this new source of power, by constructing buildings and Uranium mines, hooking them together with railroads, and powering up these new structures.  They will also be discovering new technologies along the way to assist them with this process.  Do the best job of achieving your goals and you will become the leader in this amazing new industrial revolution!

Components
The central board shows the area around Saxony, including about 20 cities.  Each city is outlined in one of four colors and includes a number of construction sites, dedicated to either buildings, mines, or turbines (the last of these make Nucleum plants more efficient).  There’s also a couple of areas that produce coal, as well as five power plants.  At the start of the game, only one of these plants (determined randomly) is capable of using Uranium; the rest can only burn coal.  There are also a bunch of unbuilt railway paths that connect these cities; each consists of from 1 to 3 segments.

The most important components in the game are the Action Tiles.  These are small, rectangular-shaped pieces of cardboard, divided into two halves (much like a domino).  Each half displays an action and is shaded in one of the city colors.  The back of each tile shows railroad tracks.  Most of the game’s activities comes from playing these tiles.

During setup, each player takes a player board, where their building, mine, and turbine pieces are stored.  Each board also includes three Income tracks—one each for Thalers (the currency of the game), Workers, and Victory Points.  The players begin with some Thalers and workers, as well as an initial Contract.  Finally, in reverse player order, each player chooses one of four Experiment boards.  Each of these boards comes with 8 technology tiles (a different group for each experiment), as well as the player’s starting Action tiles.

The Player Turn
On your turn, you must do one of three things:

• Take an Action tile from your supply and place it above your player board.  Then, you may carry out both of the actions on the tile.  In addition, you may fulfill one of your contracts if you meet its conditions.
• Take one of your Action tiles and play it to the central board as a rail segment.  Place it face-up on any empty rail space, along with one of your workers (to show that the tile is yours).  If you place the tile next to a city and the color on that end of the tile is the same as the city’s color, you may carry out the action on that half of the tile.  If the tile is placed next to a previously played tile and the two tile ends are of the same color, you may do the action on your tile.  Additionally, if the colors match, the player who owns the previously played tile (whether it’s you or an opponent) gets to do the action on their end of the tile.  Finally, if your tile completed the path between two cities, flip all of the tiles that make up that path to their railroad side.  However, the workers stay on the tiles.
• Recharge.  This allows you to take all the tiles above your player board and place them back in your supply.  You also earn income, based on how far you’ve advanced on your Thaler, worker, and VP income tracks.

Base Actions
The heart of the game is carrying out actions.  There are five base actions, most of which are fairly straightforward.  Here is a brief description of each of them:

• Urbanize.  This allows you to place one of your buildings on the board.  Each player has 12 buildings—they come in three types, in each of four levels.  The higher the level, the more Thalers you have to pay to place it.  Buildings can only be placed in one of your networks.  A city is in your network if it contains one of your structures or is next to a rail line with one of your workers.
• Industrialize.  This allows you to build one of your mines or turbines.  Each of these also comes in four levels and you have to pay workers in order to place them.  They can only be placed in one of your networks.  Mines allow you to store Uranium.  When you build one, you place Uranium cubes on them, one for each mine you’ve built, including the current one.  When you build a turbine, you unlock an ability.  They also allow players to use Uranium, as we will see.
• Develop.  This action allows you to add more Action tiles to your supply.  There are two reasons for doing this.  First, you’ll be playing Action tiles as rail links, so if you don’t replenish your supply, you’ll soon run out.  Second, the new tiles are better than the ones you start with, with bonuses and discounts to go along with their actions.  Some of them also have new kinds of actions, which will let you gain Thalers, gain workers, or advance on your Income tracks when you play them.  There is a display of five Action tiles, with costs ranging from 0 to 2 Thalers (the most recently exposed tiles are the most expensive).  When you Develop, you can pay to add one of these tiles to your supply.  You can also add a second tile if you pay 2 Thalers in addition to the cost of the two tiles.
• Contract.  You can add a contract to your player board.  There are four exposed contracts—two simpler ones and two harder ones.  Choose one and place it on one of the four slots on your board that doesn’t already contain a contract.  Depending on the slot you choose, you can gain Thalers, workers, or Uranium.  Each contract shows a condition and a reward.  On a turn when you place an Action tile above your player board, you can also fulfill one contract if you meet its condition.  There are also three very difficult contracts (with very nice rewards) which are randomly determined at the start of the game.  These can be fulfilled by the players on a first come, first serve basis, but that won’t come until later in the game.

  One of the common rewards from fulfilling a contract is to discover a technology, so let’s talk about that a bit.  As I mentioned earlier, each Experiment comes with its own unique set of 8 technologies.  These come in three levels.  Many of the contracts allow you to discover a technology of a specific level.  Technologies either give you ongoing abilities or immediate awards.  One of the 3rd level techs can give you end-game VPs; the amount depends on how well you meet its condition, but it might yield you a huge chunk of Victory Points if you do it right.  Tailoring your play to your technologies can be a big part of the strategy.

• Energize.  The Energize action allows you to power up one of your buildings.  This is the central concept of the game, so it’s the most involved of the base actions.  You begin by selecting one of the unpowered buildings you have on the board, together with one of the power plants.  Each building has a power requirement.  You get power by processing coal and Uranium, although the latter can only be used if the plant you’re using has been converted into a nucleum.  Coal must be purchased from one of the two cities that provide it.  It starts out cheap, but soon becomes much more expensive.  Uranium must come from your mines.  The building you’re powering, the plant you’re using, and the sources of coal or Uranium must all be connected by completed rail lines; any lines can be used, they don’t have to be yours.  Burning one coal gives you 1 power point and processing Uranium gives you 2 points.  The amount of Uranium you can process depends on how many turbines are co-located with the plant you’re using.  Again, the turbines don’t necessarily have to be yours, although if you use another player’s, you have to pay them 1 Thaler.

  When you power your building, you flip it over and receive the rewards listed on it.  This can include Thalers, workers, income track advancements, or discovering technologies.  You also receive Achievement tokens equal to the building’s power requirement.  I’ll get into the importance of those in just a little bit.

Each of the three player turn options has its benefits and drawbacks.  When you place a tile above your player board, you know you’ll be able to carry out both of its actions, as well as fulfilling a contract.  If you place the tile as a rail link, you’ll usually only get one action (at most), you have to sacrifice the tile, you have to spend a worker, and you can’t fulfill a contract (which turns out to be more of a hardship than you’d expect).  But you can place the tile anywhere, not just where you have a network, so it’s a great way of extending your reach on the board.  It’s also often needed in order to link up the cities you need to have connected for energizing your buildings.

Then there’s the recharge option.  Every “hand building” game needs to have a reset action, to allow you to gather up your played action cards.  But in Nucleum, recharging is considerably more involved than that.  First of all, you earn income whenever you do it, including the money and workers you will absolutely need to carry out your brilliant stratagems.  Plus, depending on how much effort you’ve put into advancing on your income tracks, there can be a nice chunk of VPs earned with each recharge.  So recharging isn’t just a necessary evil, but something you may look forward to.  In fact, it can be so lucrative that the designers came up with a very elegant way of limiting it, by tying the amount you earn from each track to how many tiles you’ve played above your board.  This stops players from repeatedly recharging and earning VPs that way, instead of actually playing the game.

In addition to all that, you get to place a marker on the Milestone track whenever you recharge.  As I mentioned earlier, when you power a building, you earn Achievement tokens.  There are a few other ways you can obtain them as well.  When you recharge, you count up how many Achievement tokens you have, return them to the stock, and then put your marker on that number on the Milestone track.  This can earn you some VPs if your marker is higher than anyone else’s; additionally, if you’re the first player to place a marker in a segment of the track, you can convert a power plant into a Nucleum.  But the main effect of placing markers is to gain endgame VPs.  Each of the four segments of the track is assigned a particular condition at the beginning of the game (for example, how many turbines you’ve built) and each marker that’s in that segment allows you to score points, based on how well you’ve met that condition.  The higher you are on the track, the greater your multiplier is for scoring points.  There are restrictions for how many markers you can have in each segment, but you can score a whole bunch of VPs if you plan this well and make sure you do a good job of meeting the conditions.

There are five endgame conditions in the game; for example, one of them is when the supply of Action tiles runs out.  When a certain number of them are satisfied, the game is over.  You then score for your powered buildings, your Milestone markers, points from your technologies, and points from very high advancement on the income tracks.  Total them all up and high score wins.

Analysis
So there’s a good deal to absorb here, but Nucleum is actually less rules-heavy than many other games of its weight.  For example, two recent Luciani heavyweights, Golem and Darwin’s Journey, are considerably more detailed and harder to teach.

But that doesn’t mean that Nucleum is easy to play.  Prior to my first session, I read the rules twice and felt I had a pretty good handle on them.  I was the first player, so I looked at my starting Action tiles, studied the board…and froze.  There were so many possibilities!  I’m by no means the fastest player in the world, but it’s unusual for me to encounter actual Analysis Paralysis like I did then.  It took me a full five minutes to come up with a plan.  It proved to be suboptimal and I flailed around for a bit, but by mid-game, I had a much better feel for things.  My second game felt much smoother, although I still made plenty of mistakes (figuring out how to score well is a bit unintuitive), so I’ve obviously got a lot to learn.  But getting to the point where I could play intelligently enough to enjoy things only took me about half a game, which is quite acceptable for a title of this weight.

There’s a lot to consider every turn, but the big decisions often come down to when and how to place your Action tiles on the board.  Playing tiles as railway links can be painful—you lose the tile, it costs you a worker, and you can’t fulfill a contract on that turn.  But the benefits are considerable.  Connecting your network to new cities is often essential for energizing and other actions.  Plus, since you can plop a tile down on any link space, it’s the easiest way to gain a foothold in a new area of the board.  If you can match colors and take one or both of the tile’s actions, that’s a very nice bonus.  So you will be waving farewell to a number of your action tiles over the course of the game.

Because of that, the Develop action takes on added importance, since you’ll need to replace the tiles you place on the board.  Be careful if you leave yourself without any of the base actions in your tile mix—that missing action may stubbornly refuse to show up among the new tiles.  Keeping a nice mix of actions, colors, and enhanced abilities is tough to do, but very worthwhile.

But the focus should be on powering up buildings, for a variety of reasons, so you need to get buildings on the board, get connected to your power sources and plants, and make sure you have fuel available.  The benefits of energizing your buildings are nice, as are the endgame building VPs.  But another big aspect is the achievement tokens powering up earns you.  This can set you up for some sweet VPs, based upon where on the Milestone track you can place your Recharge marker.  It pays to study the endgame conditions on the Milestone track at the start of the game to determine your main strategy.  All of these things need to be taken into account throughout the game and it makes for a very satisfying and enjoyable challenge.

The influences of both Barrage and Brass can clearly be seen in the design, but only in bits and pieces; Nucleum plays quite differently from both of those titles.  The weight is comparable to both those designs—maybe a little more complex than Brass and a bit less involved than Barrage.  As for player interaction, it’s just about at the same level as Brass’.  I don’t think it’s quite as high as it is for Barrage and I’m almost certain it isn’t as mean as Barrage can be.  But temporary alliances are definitely possible (for example, two players combining to connect a city they both have interest in to a power plant) and you can certainly get in your opponents’ way in Nucleum.  We didn’t do too much of that in my games, but the potential is certainly there, so this is by no means multiplayer solitaire.

For such an involved game, there are some very elegant touches in the design.  The way your income is tied to the number of tiles you’ve played is one of them.  Another is how the cost of coal is managed.  In both cases, the designers came up with simple solutions that let the players easily deal with this information.  In addition to making the game easier and quicker to play, I like to see mechanisms like this be employed—it just puts a shine on the whole playing experience and gives you the feeling that the entire production team was focused on making the game as good as it can be.

My two games were with 2 and 4 players.  The 4-player game felt like it might be closer to the standard way of doing things, but the game scaled down very nicely for 2.  The board is double-sided and one side is exclusively for 2 players, so things felt just as tight with that number as they did for 4.  Excellent job, there.  Given my druthers, I’d probably opt for 3 or 4 players, but my 2-player game was really good, so I wouldn’t hesitate to play it again (and again!) at that number.  With David Turczi as one of the co-designers, it can’t be any surprise that the game has a solo version, but I have no knowledge of how well it plays.

As is usually the case with Luciani designs, the game looks as if it will be highly replayable.  The setup includes quite a few randomly determined elements and the objectives used on the Milestone track will have a lot to do with how each game plays out.  Of course, the order that the Action tiles appear will also alter your specific strategy.  The technologies on the four Experiments are each tailored toward a particular style of play, so that’s even more variety.  It’s impossible to say how well balanced those Experiments are after only two games, but I didn’t see anything to indicate that one of them was overpowered as compared to the rest.

The rules, unfortunately, live up to what seems to have become the new normal in gaming.  That is, they are complete, but their structure makes it harder to learn the game from them than it should be.  As is so often the case, they need more examples, more important rules bolded, and fewer critical rules buried in mounds of text.  These lessons were all mastered by publishers 15 years ago, but that knowledge seems to have been lost.  During my first game, there were numerous times in which we had to search the rules for information and there were several instances in which we had to consult the Geek, since we couldn’t locate what we were looking for.  This absolutely shouldn’t be acceptable, but in recent years, I’ve found it to be the case more often than not.  So definitely some demerits for that, but I do have to give Board&Dice huge kudos for providing that rarest of gaming components:  player aids!  Not only is there a very comprehensive one for each player, but each experiment also comes with its own aid, which fully describes each of that experiment’s technologies.  This, quite honestly, is brilliant, and really helps both newer and more experienced players.  So a mixed grade there, with my frustration over the rule set almost (but not quite) overcome by my delight with a publisher who understands the great value of good player aids.

The components are similarly something of a mixed bag.  The colors on the board and tiles are easily distinguishable and the tiles and markers are well made and chunky.  But there are some areas which could have used improvement.  There’s a ton of icons and some of them aren’t all that intuitive.  There was a lot of passing of the rules during the first half of our initial game, although after that, most of them were easy to interpret.  I haven’t heard any reports of whether this game is color blind friendly or not, but the colors of the tiles and cities play a very important role and I don’t think there was any attempt to use patterns to distinguish them (it would have been hard to do, given the necessarily small size of the Action tiles).  Consequently, I wouldn’t be surprised if color blind gamers would have a hard time playing this.  Another issue is when the buildings are placed on the board, they don’t really stand out, so that you have to search around a bit to find, for example, which of your structures are still unpowered.  This is a little disappointing, since the board itself is a bit on the bland side, but the colors and patterns that were used are enough so that the buildings don’t really pop when they’re placed.  Not a major issue, but a noticeable one.  Probably my biggest complaint is with the Experiment boards.  These are slotted so that each of their 8 technologies can fit snugly in them.  The slots are arranged in such a way that each tech can also be inserted halfway, which is how you show that they aren’t discovered yet.  The techs fit in securely enough in their discovered mode, but getting them to fit in halfway was a struggle.  Moreover, it soon became apparent that if we continued to squeeze the techs in and out of the boards that these frames wouldn’t have a long life; indeed, even after one game, they were showing some wear.  It’s an idea that probably looked good on the draft board, but not in practice.  I didn’t even bother with the frames; I just piled my techs face down to the side and flipped them over in front of me after I’d discovered them.  I was able to do this because the wonderful Experiment player aids describes each of its technologies, so I didn’t have to consult the tech tiles.  Did I mention how much I loved the player aids?

Conclusion
So with Barrage as its sire and Brass as its dam, what do I think of their offspring Nucleum?  I love it!  It does have a learning curve of at least half a game, but despite being a bit overwhelmed at first, I really enjoyed working through all the possibilities and figuring out how to best power my buildings.  The double-edged Action tiles, with their key use of color, are an innovative approach to action selection and the choice between playing tiles on the board or keeping them in your supply is deliciously challenging and gives the game a unique feel.  It’s unquestionably a heavyweight, but it’s less rules heavy than other games of its weight, which is a welcome development.  I still have plenty of Essen games to explore, but right now, this is my Game of the Year and I can’t wait to play it again.  Luciani continues his remarkable winning streak when it comes to meaty games and Turczi keeps making a case to be considered among the top tier of designers.  Combining two great things doesn’t always work out, no matter what Madison Avenue tells us.  But in this case, the combination of two great designers and two great games results in a terrific title and one I think many of you will enjoy.  Even if you don’t like salted caramel.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Simon W (1 full play) – I’d concur with most of Larry’s review although I did in my game actually have a very small network on the board. Be aware however that to score your Government building you must be connected to all potentially scoring building via YOUR network and not a generic network. 

As regards being a derivative of Brass or Barrage: not too convinced. There are elements of Imperial and Great Western Trail (milestone scoring), and even Power Grid, but I suspect these claims are just to help sell the game. Nevertheless the design is smooth and very enjoyable and I had no real issue with the rule book, although we did use the Geek to quickly check certain rules or icons. I was able to teach the game in about 30 mins; like Brass the network rules are confusing at first but are quickly learned. 

It’s early days but I strongly suspect Nucleum will be my (heavy) game of the year – mainly because of the feeling that there is a lot of variability and interesting things to try coupled with the nice action tile mechanic which I really enjoy. I just need to play it a few more times to confirm that! 

Ben B (3 plays) – As a self-anointed Luciani fanboy, I tried to get this played at the Gathering but I could not fit it in. This has route building, player powers, logistical optimization, and player interaction (less than Barrage, more than Brass). I do have to admit to loving Tiletum for its efficiency tests and Barrage for its player interactivity. Nucleum does add a unique and fun game here. The rules were pretty good, better than most but still a little bit of a challenge if you didn’t watch videos and read through several times. We really struggled with placing our best tiles to score while holding some back to keep certain actions available. I have played it 3p each time and that felt about right. Luciani had a great year between Anunnaki which is fantastic and Rats of Wistar which I just played. I am looking to find Sea Dragons as well. If you like Nucleum, you may also like Ceres which another game that is well liked in this similar game space. 

Alan H – I’ve played 5 times, which is unusual for me to play any game that number of times, so not surprisingly I’m delighted with the game. The games have all been 2 and 3 player and I’d say 3 players is a more enjoyable experience but a slightly longer game.

Larry has explained all of the game in great detail, so there’s not much to add. However, in one game a player made a dramatic start by getting the lowest level industrialize action he could afford which gave him a head start in his game development. It took everyone else by surprise so when a game does that, I really enjoy delving into the game to see more options.

It’s one of the best games of 2023.

Lorna – Self admitted all-time Brass fan here. Nucleum may not be a direct descendant but the overall milieu gives you that nice brain-burning feeling. I found the action tile mechanism to be really interesting and I like the slightly asymmetric starts. The logistics of building the networks are fun. One of my top 10 of the year.

Rand – My favorite mechanism in Nucleum — the multi-use domino action tiles – is also the most incoherent with its setting. The game falls flat for me because of that and a few other minor “why this design decision for this non-problem in the game?” moments. Just because mechanisms can work together doesn’t mean they should be put together. The icing isn’t as sweet when it’s dolloped on with a flavor inconsistent with the cake.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I Love It!:  Larry, Alan How, Lorna, Craig Vollmar, Simon Neale, Justin Bell, Ryan P, Simon W, Ben
  B., Lorna
• I Like It:  Steph Hodge, Dan Blum, Michael Aldridge
• Neutral: 
• Not For Me:  Rand