Furnace and Interbellum Expansion

• Designer: Ivan Lashin
• Publisher: Arcane Wonders / Hobby World
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 12+
• Time: 30-60 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by Arcane Wonders

Furnace is an engine-building Eurogame in which players take on the roles of 19th-century capitalists building their industrial corporations and aspiring to make as much money as they can by purchasing companies, extracting resources, and processing them in the best combinations possible.

Then, with Interbellum – Furnace expands into the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century — the interwar period known as the interbellum. In this expansion, you will find new Company cards and Capitalists, new abilities, Manager tokens, variable Capital discs, a set of components for a fifth player, and new Agents for two-player and single-player games. All of this exists within beautiful industrial buildings and structures from the epoch of Art Deco, Constructivism, and Bauhaus.

Interbellum is designed for players who are already familiar with Furnace. The expansion is best played if all of its elements are added to the base game, but if you don’t feel up to it, you can get to know it piece by piece.

Each player starts the game with a random start-up card, the resources depicted at the top of that card, and four colored discs valued 1-4.  Players also get a Capitalist card which gives them a unique special ability to use during the game. 

The game is played over four rounds, and each round consists of two phases: Auction and Production. During the auction, 6-8 company cards are laid out with their basic sides face up. Players take turns placing one of their discs on one of these cards, but you cannot place a disc on a card if a disc of the same value or color is already present. Thus, you’ll place discs on four cards.

Once all the discs are placed, the cards are resolved from left to right. Whoever placed the highest-valued disc will claim this card, but first anyone with a lower-valued disc on this card will gain compensation, either the resources depicted multiplied by the value of their disc or a processing ability (exchange X for Y) up to as many times as the value of their disc.

Once all the cards have been claimed or discarded, players enter the production phase, using their cards in the order of their choice. Each company card has one action — either production or processing — on its basic side and two actions on its upgraded side. During the production phase, you can use each of your cards once to gain resources, process those resources into other resources or money, and upgrade your cards.

At the end of four rounds, whoever has the most money wins.

Furnace also includes capitalist cards that contain unique effects, and if you want, you can choose to deal one out to each player at the start of the game. For an additional challenge, you can require players to create a “production chain”, with each newly acquired company card being placed somewhere in that chain and locked in position for the remainder of the game.

The Interbellum expansion can be added in if you want to play with it.  It provides each player with a new Capital disc – this is essentially an extra bidding token, but the number of this token is now determined by how many coal cubes the player is willing to spend when they place it.  There are also new Manager tokens which can be won at auction, and then these tokens can be assigned to different cards that you own on each production phase.  Two of these come up for auction each round, so there are slightly more things to  bid on each round as well.  There are also components which allow for a fifth player to be added to the game.  Each of the different modules can be added in on their own, or you can play with all of them.

My thoughts on the game

Furnace was one of the many games that came out in the Covid era that I simply missed the first time around (another recently discovered gem was Aquatica, also released by Arcane Wonders).  I had heard a bit about the game, but I never was ended up at a game table with it – and the way our hobby is right now, there was no shortage of new games to play once the world settled down and allowed people to sit around the same table again.

With the release of the new expansion, I finally was able to get a copy of Furnace, and I’m sad that I missed it.  It’s a really tight auction / resource management game, and the neat auction/compensation mechanism is quite fascinating.  You’re trying to build an engine of cards in your area (which you have to win via auction) in order to make goods, process them and then sell them for money (VPs).  A decent coal production card might make you 2 or 3 coal cubes.  However, the compensation for some cards might be 2 coal cubes, and if you are able to place your 3 marker on this card, and lose the auction, you’ll end up with 6 coal cubes!  There are definitely times when you bid on an auction intending to lose it – because you’d much rather have the compensation than the card itself…

Due to the timing of card resolution as well as the bidding rules, you might actually be the first person to bid on a card, but you use a number low enough to try to ensure that you lose it.  I.e. you need a steel to process through a compensation conversion at the end of the line, and you don’t have one now – so you try to unsuccessfully bid on a card that gives a steel as compensation earlier on… This leads to a lot of interesting decisions to be made in the auction phase; and you might find yourself bidding on something earlier than you want since you can’t duplicate the bid of another marker on a card.

The production phase can cause a bit of AP if you are prone to it –  but our group seems to do just fine.  We just say that you tap a card when you use it and there aren’t any takebacks.  Just run your engine using your cards in the order of your choice and be done with it.  I have heard others who use the variant where your cards are fixed in a line and you must always activate them left to right; but we haven’t gone that route – there are too many good combos to figure out as you gain more cards, and I wouldn’t want to remove the funnest part of the game.  (Yes, I know funnest isn’t really a word, but I’m still using it).

The expansion adds a number of things.  The variable bid marker is the biggest change, and it really opens up the game – no longer is an opening 4 bid a sure thing; as long as people have enough cubes, they can up the ante and bid higher.  Now at the start of every round, we go around the table and announce how many black cubes we’re starting with so that each player’s max bid is known.

The manager tokens are also an interesting addition. Two of these tokens go up each round, and they can be used tactically to just start your engine.  As with the regular company cards, not every manager token is going to feel useful to you; so you’ll have to figure out the right value for them.  The manager tokens won early on are likely somewhat more valuable as you’ll get to use them in more production phases, but I have definitely seen a game turn on last round token that allowed for a huge extra sale to happen.  

If you use these modules, the game becomes slightly longer – you are adding two extra components to the auction to consider as well as one full additional round of bidding as each player now has a fifth bidding token.  Furthermore, there are more things to think about each production phase, and this will also take a bit longer to process.   That being said, the game still keeps a fairly good clip, and the auctions remain engaging and competitive.

Once everyone is familiar with the game, you can play with the expansion in probably 30-40 minutes, and there is definitely a lot of game here for that short time period.  Each game will end up being a little different due to alterations made in setup (giving a different deck distribution) as well as which Manager tokens come into play (and which Business school cards are randomly chosen to be part of the auction tableau).    The added complexity of the game with the expansion more than makes up for the added game time.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers for Furnace (base)

• I love it! 
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral. 
• Not for me…

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers for Furnace (base+Interbellum expansion)

• I love it!  Dale Y
• I like it. John P
• Neutral. 
• Not for me…