Nucleum Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Nucleum, a euro style board game published by Board and Dice. In Nucleum, players do a bunch of stuff that will earn them points to eventually help them win.

Themes in tabletop games used to come in two general varieties: Entirely themeless—think Mancala—and late 90s Euro-style themes involving trading goods in an “exotic” locale (which is to say: also themeless). In recent years, Euro games have decided to abandon some of the traditional themes in favor of fresh—and increasingly bizarre—settings. Enter Nucleum, which is a train game that has trains but also has a magical (?) resource (?) that powers everything in this futuristic (?) world.

Nucleum is designed by David Turczi and Simone Luciani, tables 1-4 players, and takes about 150 minutes to play.

When first faced with the daunting task of giving a rules overview for such a complicated game, I was a bit overwhelmed. I turned to my dear friend and BGQ colleague Brandon Bryson for advice. His advice: “Broad strokes, my friend. Broad strokes.” So here goes: In Nucleum, players do a bunch of stuff that will earn them points, and then, eventually, one of them will win.

In slightly less—but still very—broad strokes: Nucleum is a route-building and action-selection game. Each turn, players will select one of the action tiles in front of them and trigger the associated action(s). This is done by either taking the action tile and adding it to the top of one’s individual player board, adding a tile as a route to the main board, or recharging their pool of action tiles.

Without going into too much detail (BGQ only has so much ink in its coffers, after all), the non-board actions will help players in a variety of ways, like increasing the size of one’s action pool or unlocking new personal scoring opportunities. Playing a tile onto the main board gives players the opportunity to not only expand the route toward one of the game’s coveted production locations but also trigger extra actions if they’re able to link