The Manhattan Project First Impressions

The Manhattan Project is a game of who is bigger…

But no bang?

The Global power struggle begins but which nation will take the lead and become world’s dominant superpower?

The Manhattan Project makes you the leader of a great nation’s atomic weapons program in a deadly race to build bigger and better bombs. Assign your workers to multiple projects: building your bomb-making infrastructure, expending your military to protect it, or sending your spies to steal your rival’s hard work!

You alone control your nation’s destiny. You choose when to send out your workers–and when to call them back. Careful management and superior strategy will determine the winner of this struggle. So take charge and secure your nation’s future!

So the goal here is to build huge bombs. It’s a worker placement game where different workers do different things. It’s a bit of a Mathy one where ‘Optimal Play Bots’ will do very well.

So there’s this main player board… this one…

This is a very nice looking, well-laid-out board where most of the worker placement takes place. It’s one of those ‘Either place a worker or pull back or your workers’ type games which I like. So this mainboard gives your buildings you can buy, you can gain money, yellow cake, Uranium, Plutonium and new workers and contractors.

Buildings

You build buildings onto your own player board. You can use them to gain resources but other players can use them IF they have enough on the Espionage track.

You’re trying to build bombs, here are some…

As you might be able to see they each provide a different number of VPs depending on the number of resources needed to build it.

So you place workers to gain more workers to gain yellow cake to gain Plutonium or Uranium and draft bomb plans to build bombs to get points to win.

The Manhattan Project Summary

It’s… Good. I like the 3 different types of workers (Normal, Scientist and Engineer) that are used in different ways. The random country you start to represent at the beginning of the game gives a seemingly well-balanced ability to each player. I like that spaces are VERY limited and the theme of the Espionage track is great.

It’s just not… Great? I dunno, I enjoyed it but it seems there is a RIGHT move on most turns.

Jesta ThaRogue