Little Factory

I feel like this game... felt more like a farm sim than a factory sim. There were cows and sheep and yarn and the buildings looked like farm buildings. When I think of factory I think industrial, and this game just didn't feel like that most of the time. It was fairly easy to learn and play, but I think it'd be better if you could shave off about 10 mins of playtime.

This is a quick engine builder with great art style. The new resources bring a breath of fresh air to the stale european themed resource conversion game.

This is a great game for gathering and playing cards that lead to exciting chain reactions and big plays. Fun with older kids as a family game that teaches which cards to focus on to create those chain reaction opportunities and which to avoid because they don't fit into the tableau you are trying to cultivate.

Little Factory has delightful resource chaining of this resource gets you this specific more expensive resource to get this building, and has some tableau-building engine building concepts with its buildings giving you free specific conversion aspects in the game. It also has an interesting concept where there are only limited copies of each resource at a time. This adds interaction of sniping your opponent's resources, but can also lead to frustration if your supposed engine sputters. The game attempts to mitigate this sputtering by allowing you to spend your turn exchanging resources for others of equal value, but the combination of limited resources and the specificity of the buildings means this game may leave a bad taste on most first plays, as your buildings fail to activate often and thus become glorified VPs. That being said, when things do work out and you have one building output the intake of another which feeds into yet another to give you points it is really satisfying. And the game is fairly easy to pick up and is fast. In other words, Little Factory is a little rough around the edges, and like its spiritual predecessor Little Town is fairly light, but due to its interesting concepts and being under $20 it may be worth checking out.