How to play My Father’s Work (Spoiler Free)

My Father’s Work is a worker placement game.

Title: My Father’s Work

Year Published: 2022

Designer: T. C. Petty III

Publisher: Renegade Game Studios

Players: 2-4

Game Time: ~180 mins

Set-up Time: ~10 mins

Ages: 14+

Theme: Mad scientists and horror

Mechanisms: Worker Placement

How to win: Score points my expanding your estate and completing experiments

Game Description

The walls were lined with iron shelves, each metal slat overfilled with glass jars containing formaldehyde and grotesque curiosities within. Pristine brass tools and refined metals of a quality I had never before laid eyes upon were strewn across sturdy slabs of rock and wood, their edges sharp with use. However, my eyes were soon drawn to a sturdy writing desk, its mahogany eaves inlaid with thin strips of copper, the center of which contained a well-worn leather-bound book. My father’s journal — passed down to me and representing years of knowledge and countless experiments. And inside that weathered tome, atop the pearly parchment oxidized yellow at its frayed edges, were the deliberate quill marks of a crazed genius outlining the ambitious project he could never complete in one lifetime — his masterwork.

Without realizing it, my hands were shaking as I clutched the book to my chest. At once, I felt an ownership and anxiety for the scientific sketches scrawled so eloquently on those frayed sheets. It was at that moment that I began my obsession: I would restore this laboratory to its former brilliance and dedicate my life to completing my father’s work!

How to play My Father’s Work

How to play My Father’s Work with no spoilers!

Theme

Can’t go wrong with creepy horror and mad scientists! The way the world changes and evolves is something I really like in a game.

Setup & Rulebook

Setup is fairly easy, the app guides you step by step through the fiddley bits so it all feels very straightforward.

The app was late, but it’s OK. The text is really tiny on my iPhone 12 and it’s very slow on my Fire Tablet so not sure which I’ll go with when I play next.

The rulebook does a pretty decent job but could have been clearer in some aspects, especially around specific examples. To be fair, it’s hard when the rules change round to round depending on what the app has to say

Components & Artwork

Obviously, the components are really nice. They have a ‘premium Kickstarter’ look and feel but this was actually under £100 with postage. The trays stack well and everything fits very well in the box.

The art has that creepy feel but I’ll be honest, I was only looking at the symbols when playing.

Ease of Teaching

So this can be looked at from both sides:

1 – It’s good because there are very few rules to teach up front then new rules are drip fed to players via the app making it easy to learn.

2 – It’s bad because while most of the game can be taught up front, the mystery of what’s to come can lead competitive players to ask a lot of questions.

My Father’s Work Summary

I recently did my Top 10 Worker Placement Games on Youtube while I owned this, but I hadn’t played it yet. This was due to a delay in the app being released and it’s a shame as it would have been very high on the list.

The game itself is a very straightforward worker placement game. You don’t have spaces fully blocked out, you can pay can to place there too so it’s restrictive, but not frustrating.

I love the way the story and the town you play in develops as the game progresses. This is a spoiler-free review so I won’t say but something major happened in my first game which means something big was taken away from me. We could have prevented it, but we failed. It was a tad annoying but made sense in the context of the story.

Yeah, there is a lot of reading which is difficult in an echoey room full of gamers and it is a bit long at 3+ hours.

You also don’t seem to get many actions? 9 rounds 3-4 per round maybe? I guess it depends on how many people you can pull out of lost when you can. You also need 6 experiements before you can complete your Masterwork… but can only carry one over per generation?

I need to get better at this game I guess?

My Father’s Work Round-Up

This is a very fun worker placement game that tells a really good story.

Rating

I give it 8/10