Automation and factory construction games have become very popular in recent years, with Coffee Stain Studios’ Satisfactory being one of the stars of the genre. I’ve always admired the sprawling conveyor belts and megastructures of the factory building powerhouse from a comfortable distance, dipping my toes in the waters with my own messy (but mostly functional) factories. Soon, factory builders will have a whole new way to develop their process, as explained by Mood Publishing, the same publisher behind Hitman: the board gamelooks to bring the beloved factory simulation to your table with Satisfactory: The Board Game and the launch of its latest crowdfunding campaign on Game found. We received an early prototype to check out, in addition to playing a demo with the game’s designer, David Thor Fjalarsson, to see if a tabletop game can capture and refine the satisfying experience down to the size of a kitchen table-sized factory.
In Satisfactory: The Board Game (referred to simply as “Satisfactory” in the future), designed by David Thor Fjalarsson, up to four players will need to operate, refine and upgrade their factories in a bid to earn the most FICSIT points before the space elevator ends. The turns themselves are surprisingly simple; on your turn, you will perform two actions: either build something, move around the map, or let your factory do its thing. Once each player has taken their turn, the production phase begins, where everyone’s mines will activate, drilling for one of the three base materials (limestone, iron or copper) and the existing materials will go down their conveyors to be refined into better resources. Then the whole cycle repeats Even in my first match, by the time my group reached the second or third round, we had the rhythm.
The game itself takes place on a large hexagonal grid representation of the massive video game world, with random creatures and biomes that are placed during setup, as well as various material-rich points where mines can be placed. The “Move” action is pretty self-explanatory, allowing you to move your piece up to a number of squares equal to your movement value, with some squares only being able to be moved through once certain technologies or vehicles are built. Landing on a point can grant you resources or allow you to claim one of the previously mentioned tokens. If you prefer to do extra work in your factories, you can instead opt for the “Workshop” action, which allows you to either move a line of resources to a given location or refine a single block of material into a higher level version, which is a crucial element when you build.
Speaking of building things, the “Build” action was my favorite and what I would consider the essential thing to do in this game. At any time, players will have access to building their basic devices (extractors, refineries, etc.), in addition to a random pool of cards of different levels that will be unlocked during the game. These cards, like the Jet Pack to help you move faster or the weapons to take on wildlife, are a great help, but the Main structures you can build have a little extra fun. Depending on what you build, you will have a bonus action you can take, determined by what you have built. Building a Miner, for example, will allow you to immediately build a Belt, which will then trigger the Belt bonus, giving you a free move action, or the Builder, giving you an extra action you can take on your turn. Chaining these power-ups together to create wild spins was some of the most fun I had while playing Satisfactory.
As for gameplay, Satisfactory’s tabletop adaptation has opted for a competitive “points race” experience for its main game, instead of the PC title’s co-op focus – although the promised final game will also include co-op and single-player modes. That said, don’t expect to bombard or wipe out other players’ extractors and belts with in-game cardboard corporate terrorism. Instead, once a player has claimed a tile by building something on it, no other players can expand on it, although they can still pass through it without issue. Satisfactory can still be “mean”, but it’s more about cleverly hindering or making your opponents’ expansion boring rather than turning the planet into a battlefield.
This kind of head-butting only really shows up when you start counting three or four players. With two players, because both players have much more space, I was surprised and impressed by how different Satisfactory manages to feel. During my two-player playthrough, with much less worry about my factory being locked out by other players, I was instead able to focus and figure out the best way to try to optimize (as optimized as possible in a game like this after only a few plays) my system. Honestly, it felt like I was playing different games depending on the number of players, with two players focusing on optimization and planning turns to maximize points, while with three, and especially four, finding the best way to expand my factory and balance blocking other people’s resources was much more at the forefront of my mind. Oddly enough, I think I enjoyed the enigmatic nature of the lower player count more, because we weren’t both forced into conflict with each other, and I was able to better test out what Satisfactory offers.
In a two-player game, I focused on maximizing my base resource production, getting all of my extractors online as quickly as possible, and extending my reach to a few more distant “rich” tiles, allowing me to produce more resources during production phases. Having a near glut of these cheaper resources allowed me to gobble up and quickly complete the early game milestones, earning me a bunch of points and propelling me into the lead, faster than the elevator could take me. During one particularly memorable event, thanks to the rewards given for completing objectives and what I had earned in the different biomes I visited that round, I was able to complete four of the milestones consecutively. It was a direct injection of dopamine into the system and essentially sold me only on the Satisfactory level.
Granted, I approached Satisfactory from the perspective of someone who hasn’t put as many hours into the game it was adapted from, but even this condensed package still manages to FEEL like Satisfactory. Watching my conveyor belt paths expand outward on the map, discovering alternative recipes, and building the network of machines to allow me to continue refining my products and pioneering new technologies is always there. Even memorable creatures like Bean are here. There are plenty of other nods that long-time players will understand better than me, but I applaud the designers for managing to make this feel satisfying at its core. The tabletop adaptation obviously can’t replicate the massive, near-limitless scale of the PC game, but it seems to have managed to exploit what matters most: building an efficient system, then racing it until you need to upgrade it to reach greater heights.
If there’s one thing interested builders should be aware of, it’s that Satisfactory is not a small game. It requires a lot of table space to play and will bombard you with icons. When its multiple boards, stacks of cards, large game board, and resource tokens are all laid out, it’s a surprisingly imposing tabletop experience. Some smart decisions, like limiting the number of material types to just three, fortunately help you avoid getting overwhelmed with resource management. Frankly, keeping track and remembering the meaning of all the icons was more complicated than managing my stocks of colored cubes.
Different icons appear everywhere, on cards, on the map, on player boards and even on the victory point track, and at least in the prototype I had it didn’t come with a player reference card. Fortunately, I was assured that there would be one that would come with the release copy, which should alleviate some of that headache of keeping track of what means what. It took most of the game to grasp the icons, but eventually it started to click, and again, much of that pain will be alleviated with the inclusion of a reference map.
Satisfactory: The board game is still being tweaked and adjusted, but Mood seems to have successfully stripped down the complex factory building game and distilled it down to its raw materials to create a surprisingly accessible (if not a little intimidating) board game. The limited action choices you have on your turn help keep the turns quick and snappy, but I can definitely see how, if you tend to hyper-analyze your turns or need to make the most optimized play, the turns could easily take a little longer. Regardless, the implementation here, fitting so many systems while still being a game that doesn’t take all day to play (my games were typically 2-3.5 hours), is impressive. Fortunately, before saving the game, a preview version of the rules has been released with the full list of addons and what is included in the contribution levels on the Game page found. Or, better yet, you and your gaming group can try it out for yourselves in Tabletop Simulator on Steam using a official preview build mod produced by MOOD! Now back to the question of how to build my own mega-factory.
Gn tech
