Take the Power Back – A City of the Great Machine Review

“At a certain point, we will build machines that are smarter than we are. And once we have machines that are smarter than we are, they will begin to improve themselves. And then we risk what the mathematician I. J. Good called an intelligence explosion – that the process could get away from us.” – Sam Harris

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Artificial intelligence. is a charged term at the moment. Almost a slur. I can indeed imagine a world improved by A.I. One where you can ask ChatGPT for a review of a board game and you just get it. “What do you think of the new Monopoly Scrabble hybrid you soulless demon?” And it instantly tells you. It’s a beautiful world and it’s coming.

But it’s easier to imagine death, destruction, and apocalypse. It’s easier to imagine forced servitude and oppression. We’re already being prepped for it by corporations and conglomerates. Tyler Durden warned us, but we weren’t listening.

CrowD Games’ City of the Great Machine is a big breath. It’s a moment coming to shape where we can collectively pump our fist and spit at circumstances beyond our control. It’s a giant “fuck you” to A.I. art, to the man and to the Great Machine.

This metallic overlord deserves it. Built to service the people residing in the city floating in the sky, the machine has slowly affected every aspect of daily life. It’s improved everything we know, piece by piece, until it’s co-opted the entire human experience. The machine’s closest servants are less than human. The bulk of the rest are mindless serfs forced to toil away under the illusion of an enhanced existence.

This is a tragedy, one which graphs onto real-world circumstance that we can relate to. I don’t know about you, but it’s easy to get angry and City of the Great Machine is a spark to the husk of a dead limb.

As a board game, this is a singular entity. I’m going to compare it to some things and use some buzz words – you know I love those – but it’s really its own thing.

The structure is that of a one-vs-many game. This is typical of that style; one player takes on the role of an overlord or bad guy and the rest of the players form up as a band of heroes. The villain here is the steampunk A.I. menace. As dictated by the rulebook, all players must refer to this person as “The Great Machine”. Enforce this. Oppress them.

The good people are the revolutionaries. They’re the remnant of humanity, the ones thinking clearly. They’re going to bring this Rube Goldberg contraption down and they’re going to piss on its bones until they rust.

But the radicals must hurry.

The doomsday clock is ticking in the background. When it strikes 12, the revolutionaries lose as the Great Machine has engulfed the floating city and seized utter control. How you stymie this threat is by fostering riots. To convince the artists, businesspeople, and politicians to speak out and oppose the machine, you must create discontent.

Every turn the heroes plot in secret. Sitting on one side of the table, they show each other cards and mumble in code. “I’m thinking about going there” someone says, holding up a card to their brothers and sisters. All discussion is in veiled language, much implied rather than outright stated. This is because the Machine is watching. The player in the role of the automaton terror is staring at them coldly. Watching their faces. Watching their eyes. Trying to see what they see.

Eventually, the revolutionaries lock in their decision, placing their cards on the table facedown. Then the Great Machine awakens. Cold gears begin to turn and a facsimile of life appears. The adversary takes action, moving their three servants to various locations and shuffling the mindless robots between destinations. The A.I. foe is trying to get into the heads of the collective in order to predict what they’re trying to accomplish and set traps. They’re also trying to jam up their movement, causing the group to spend more resources or risk capture by moving through districts with a heavy presence.

There’s more than just movement though. The Machine can activate special locations with their servants. They can manipulate the board, physically moving the district tiles into new formations. They can draw these glorious directives and put them into play, functionally changing the rules of the game and enhancing their own abilities in a system similar to Twilight Imperium laws.

All of this is glorious and effective and there are so many options but not enough resources to do it all.

When the Machine is satisfied with their turn, the revolutionaries are then given the baton. They reveal their cards and move to their hidden destinations. This is the moment of truth, where tension breaks like a wave and violently tosses aside those who refuse to budge.

The revolutionary movement system could be described as hidden movement, but that’s only partially accurate. It’s most similar to Stronghold Games’ Not Alone, an unheralded small box design that’s been somewhat forgotten. But that’s a 40-minute breezy thing. This is a two-and-a-half-hour sophisticated appliance that can be extremely thinky and exhilarating.

That’s a combination I haven’t found too often.

Usually cognitively engaging designs tend to be extraordinarily heavy and exhaustive experiences. They typically aren’t dramatic or chaotic and offer few standup moments, instead opting for satisfying systems that result in fulfillment. City of the Great Machine is mentally intricate, but it’s also wild and at times unruly. Players are getting captured in raids, the rules of the game are changing, and the board itself shifts like a Transformer in heat. It’s something to behold.

Then there’s the event deck. It’s the best event deck there ever was. Truly.

They’re these big cards. The top half is an alternate rule for the turn, a shakeup. Maybe the revolutionaries can break robots for cheaper, or perhaps everyone gets extra resources this round. There are a lot of these and it’s difficult to predict what will happen.

But the bottom half of the card is different. It’s a condition, an objective if you will, that results in the doomsday clock ticking forward. It’s what the Machine is trying to accomplish on this turn and what the many are trying to prevent.

The brilliance is in how the objective interacts with the rule adjustment for the round. Such as players being able to move around more freely, but if they end their turn on the space of a servant, the objective is fulfilled and the clock progresses. Or perhaps it’s trivially easy for the Machine to pass directives, but if they end the round with no directives in play the clock ticks forward. Often there are hard decisions, and there are mind games. This is the beauty of Great Machine, for as sophisticated and rich its systems are, much of the real game is taking place above the table.

At some point, the players start to get it. They begin to act erratically and talk to each other with deliberate phrases. Often, they try to lay snares for the Machine through their words. Alluding to a certain move, hoping their foe takes the bait and suffers the misdirection. There’s an intense battle of will and communication and sheer contempt riding along the horizon and overriding everything occurring below. It’s glorious.

I adore this game. It’s the best board game to be released in 2023 at this point in time. It has the best rulebook of any game of its weight and class. It includes a robust solitaire mode that is legitimately interesting and exists almost as a full product in its own right. It’s a beautiful physical artifact and it serves as pointed criticism of our infatuation with artificial intelligence and the folly therein. It’s not thematic because it has illustrations and conflict and flavor text, it’s thematic because it actually says something about our current predicament and embeds that sharp commentary into the gameplay. It’s also terrific and horrifying that in the multiplayer format, it places a player in the role of the artificial consciousness, reflecting on the notion that we’ve done this to ourselves. Then it asks that imitation to get on its belly and crawl in the dirt, pressing its ear to the ground and trying to understand how these fleshy insects think.

This game is pure class, only hindered by a rather lengthy playtime and an inherent fragility if one side struggles to form a coherent strategy or internalize the rules. There are clear and satisfying methods to adjust the difficulty, however, swinging balance in either direction. So even that’s not a mar worth dwelling on. It does requires exactly three revolutionary characters, regardless of player count. So, in a three-player outing, the two on the Many side must share one of the asymmetric heroes. This isn’t terribly problematic; however, some players may find this an annoyance.

You may not appreciate or desire this type of game – a confrontational sorta hidden movement weirdthing. That’s fine. Maybe it’s too long for you, or you loathe the steampunk aesthetic. Sure. But me, I think this thing moves the needle. It captures my rage and my despair. It lets me fight against the invisible walls that are closing in. It lets me put this formless thing beneath my boot and crush it, or die trying.

 

A review copy of the retail edition of the game was provided by the publisher.

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