Widget Ridge is a 1 to 2 player deck-building game of absurdist steampunk awesomeness (3 to 4 players supported with two core sets). The goal is to acquire Augments, Devices, and Accessories in order to connect them into an ever-modulating construct to generate spark to win the game. So build your Solar-Powered Mechanical Bison with a Parachute to disrupt my Coal-Powered Battle Corset on Wheels before it takes over! (Emergence Expansion [and core game] on Kickstarter until Sunday, November 22 2020 11:00 PM CST.)
How to Play
All players begin the game with 10 starter cards which can produce gold and/or spark. Gold is the currency you accumulate in a single turn to buy new cards. Spark is the victory points you track to win the game. On a turn, you will usually start with 5 cards in hand.
Play a Card
The first thing you will do is play a card from your hand. If it is a starter card or a Left/Right card, you will gain an immediate effect, usually Gold or Spark. Center cards provide no immediate effect.
If you still have more cards in hand, you may play them now or you may Buy a new card or Add a played card to your Workshop.
Buy a Card
If you have generated Gold this turn by playing one or more cards, you may buy one of the 6 cards from the marketplace. The cost is the number in the upper right hand corner gear. Bought cards immediately go to your discard pile and the marketplace is immediately refilled to 6 cards. Gold does not carry over between turns.
If you still have more gold to spend, you may Buy another card or you may Play a card or Add a played card to your workshop
Add a Played Card to Your Workshop
The workshop is the heart of the game. Anytime after you’ve played a non-starter card on your turn, you may add it to your workshop, assuming proper Connections. When a center card becomes connected to a Left/Right card, you get the center card’s connection ability. There is no limit to the number of connection effects you can get in a single turn; however, two cards can only connect to each other once per turn.
A workshop may have no more than one Left card (Augment), one Center card (Device), and one Right card (Accessory). Center cards have connectors on both sides, Left/Right cards have connectors on only one side. To add a card, your workshop must either be empty or the new card must form a connection with a Center card. You may discard a Left/Right/Center card to replace it with a new card of the same type. (Your workshop may not contain both a Left and Right card with no center.) This is where center cards shine.
For example, say I have played the 6 cards in the picture above and my workshop is empty. First, I add Perfectly Balanced to my workshop. Since it does not connect to a center card, nothing happens. Second, I add Battle Corset to my workshop creating a connection between the two cards and triggering Battle Corset’s “Gain 3 Spark. You may draw a card, then discard a card” connection ability. Third, I add On Wheels to my Workshop and get a second Battle Corset connection trigger. Fourth, I want to add Solar-Powered to my Workshop, so my Perfectly-Balanced gets discarded first, and then I get a Battle Corset connection trigger. Fifth, I want to add Mechanical Bison, so my Battle Corset gets discarded first, and then I get two connection triggers from my Mechanical Bison, since we just created a connection between both Mechanical Bison/Solar-Powered and Mechanical Bison/On Wheels. Sixth, I want to add With a Parachute, so my On Wheels gets discarded first, and then I get a Mechanical Bison connection trigger.
After Adding a played card to your Workshop, if you have more played Left/Right/Center cards, you may Add them to your workshop or you may Play a card or Buy a card.
Full Construct Phase
Once you no longer want to Play more cards, Buy more cards, or Add more cards to your Workshop, any of your cards not in your workshop are discarded (either from your hand or in play). Then you draw back up to 5 cards in hand (shuffle your discard pile to form a new deck if needed).
Once you’ve drawn back up, if you have a full Left/Center/Right workshop, you may trigger your “Full Construct” ability, resolving it from left to right.
For example, the Solar-Powered Mechanical Bison with a Parachute would go:
You may pay 3 spark, If you do, you may melt a card, OR you may put a card from your discard pile into your hand.
The Perfectly-Balanced Battle Corset on Wheels would go:
You may draw a card OR melt a card, If you do, draw a card, and your opponents discard a card, OR melt a card in the marketplace and gain Spark equal to its printed cost.
The Solar-Powered Battle Corset on Wheels would go:
You may pay 3 spark, If you do, draw a card, and your opponents discard a card, OR melt a card in the marketplace and gain Spark equal to its printed cost.
Once you’ve resolved your Full Construct ability, it is the next player’s turn. Repeat until someone reaches 100 spark (or the win condition of whichever setup you are using is met).
Other Clarifications
Melt: remove a card from your hand, your discard pile, or the common marketplace to the corresponding melt pile (it will not be shuffled into your deck, you may never melt an opponent’s card)
Destroy: discard a card from a Workshop (it will be shuffled back into its owner’s deck)
In a two-player game, the game starts with the first player drawing only 3 cards while the second player draws 5 cards. First turn only.
My Thoughts
I love the flavor, I’m hooked by the strategic depth, and I’m overwhelmingly impressed by the balance.
This game is just fun, and a large part of the reason behind it is the excellent storytelling evoked by the card names, flavor text, and art. While my opponents are taking their turns, I’ll just start giggling as I think about what I’m going to build, like the Coal-Powered Street Sweeper with “Gold” Plating or the Wood-Burning Treebuchet On Stilts (which the flavor text acknowledges is actually a Ballista). I also can’t help smiling as I think back to the time I built a Doom Cannon, to corral some mechanical bison as you do, just to have a sentient statue throw a brick at it to break it immediately after I got it online and finished that job.
However, even if you stripped out all of the flavor of the game, I’d be sad, but I’d still want to play based purely on the gameplay. The workshop enables interesting dynamics between cards as you consider whether to buy a Left/Right card for its on-play effect, its Full Construct effect, and/or its possible connectors to your Center cards that you either bought for its connection effects, its Full Construct effect, or conversely, its possible connectors to your already purchased Left/Right cards. Further, you need to consider whether to buy multiple types of Left, Right, and/or Center cards: more cards of each type enables more connection effects but prevents you from keeping a specific card in your workshop for its Full Construct effect. For even further consideration, you need to decide when to leave cards in your workshop because while they’re in your workshop, they don’t get shuffled back into your deck, so you can’t trigger their on-play effects again (for Left/Right cards). Even further yet, you can keep track of what your opponent is doing and whether or not you need to buy cards to disrupt their workshop and/or prevent your opponent from buying them.
Or, you can just buy the cards you have enough gold to afford and see how it unfolds. As long as you pay some attention to the connectors on your cards and get some of each type of Left/Right/Center that can connect to each other, powerful things will happen. Making connections in your workshop and getting a Full-Construct also just feels good. It’s incredibly satisfying just watching your Doom Cannon go brrr. In the late game you can also have ridiculous turns with massive chains of connections as you draw hands full of non-starter cards; you get to initially play them for their on-play effects and then swap them into your workshop for connection effects, either of which might draw you more cards to keep going. Whether you go for a mass connections strategy, a targeted Full Construct strategy, or something inbetween, you’re doing it right because the game is so absurdly well-balanced.
Out of all of the games I have played only one of them wasn’t close, and I mean really, really close. Aside from that one game where I got a Doom Cannon literally as early as possible and it lived up to its name for my opponent, every one of those games ended where the next player would have won on their turn, every one, including when I played solo. EVERY ONE, HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE IAN?! I am still legitimately shocked by this, especially since I actively pursue as many different strategies as possible when I play games, and this is no exception.
One aspect of the game that enables this is the cards that give bonus/alternate effects if you have less spark than your opponents. While this may be a turnoff for some people, it has never felt bad when playing it, even when I was the one ahead at the time, partly because those effects immediately switch off if that player pulls ahead, which can cause them to stall out as you rocket past them again to secure the win after they ended at 99 spark (good times). Further, endgame spark generation can reach 30+ spark in a single turn, so there have been multiple games with last-second come-from-behind wins, that are just cool to watch play out regardless of which side of the table you’re on, at least in my experience.
Conclusion
I highly recommend this game. It is currently on Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/furioustreegames/widget-ridge-emergence) for a new three character-pack expansion which enables cooperative campaign play, but you can also get everything else that has been released so far: the invention expansion set which has amazing cards like the Treebuchet, two story packs, and the Walkabout expansion with locations that affect the marketplace, all great stuff. Ian Taylor, the creator, has also written a bunch of excellent short stories in the Widget Ridge Universe if you, like me, want more of that delicious flavor. (Widget Ridge can also be bought from that website if you see this after the Kickstarter ends.)
For an illustration of how much I enjoy this game, this is the first game review I have done since October 2017, with the last complete review more than a year before that. I’ve received no compensation for this review, I just want more people playing it because it is awesome.