My Father’s Work – Kickstarter Edition

It’s fair to say that the image of scientists has changed a lot over the years. In the modern era, they are generally seen as smart, level-headed people with good intentions driven primarily by a desire to help Humanity. Even Oppenheimer probably meant well. But that image hasn’t always been the case and in “My Father’s Work”, that is not the kind of scientist you will be playing. Here you take the role of the other kind of scientist, more familiar to film fans and readers of Gothic Horror; the one who tends to laugh out loud for no reason and for a little too long. Who live in neighbourhoods where local pets go missing with disturbing regularity. Who favours working nights and who may or may not employ a lab assistant named Igor. One hesitates to use the word “Mad”, but if the blood-splattered Leather apron fits… Well, that’s you.

During the game, players will embody three generations of an increasingly Eccentric and Notorious family of aristocrats, gathering knowledge and performing experiments to complete a Masterwork of their Infamous predecessor. Within one of three different scenarios, an App driven Story will force the players to make hard choices and decisions about what kind of scientist they want to be, harmless eccentric or homicidal megalomaniac, while shaping the playing board over the course of the game. Whether your endeavours help or harm the local town and its people will depend entirely on these decisions so no two games will ever be exactly the same. Whoever has the most victory points at the end will triumph however Science will be the real winner! The hapless Townsfolk? Maybe not so much.

The Scientific Method

At its heart, My Father’s Work is a basic worker placement game. In each round, Players have up to 6 miniatures, which represent the Scientist and his or her spouse, Caretakers and servants. In turn, players will place one or more of their pieces either on the Village spaces on the main board or the on their player boards, called their Estate to take actions. The aim is to gather enough resources to complete Experiment cards which in turn will give victory points as well as more resources or knowledge cubes.

Over three generations, players will hopefully gather enough knowledge to be able to complete their Masterwork, an experiment chosen at random at the beginning of the game that will earn the players beaucoup Victory points. A player can still win without completing this, but not easily. Other elements can restrict or enhance the players’ different choices as well, such as their position on the “Creepy” and “Insanity” tracks.

Some actions and experiments will result in the player becoming more sinister to local townsfolk or move them a step closer to losing their mind and these tracks on the min board record this. If a player becomes too Creepy, they will be prohibited from visiting the local town and can only take actions on their estate board, at least until they have found a way to repair their reputation. In the case of the insanity track, players moving up will gain compulsion cards. These are mini-objectives that give victory points when completed.

However, if a player has more than two uncompleted at the end of a generation they will receive a maladjustment card- an entirely negative, and sometimes quite debilitating, penalty. The insanity mechanic is an intriguing feature as it punishes players who go all out for big scoring experiments. However, the victory points gained from the compulsion cards can sometimes be enough to build a healthy lead on the points track so can be very useful. And as the great philosopher Seal once observed, you are never going to survive unless you get a little crazy…

After each generation, the game partially resets and players surrender their resources, money and all but one completed and uncompleted experiment. With the exception of some upgrade abilities, the only progress carried over between generations are the Rooms in their estate, tiles that are available to build on your player board that gives useful in-game bonuses; and stored knowledge in the journal. So one of the main early game decisions for players is whether to use their coloured knowledge cubes to conduct the more complex experiments and get points on the board or to record knowledge in the journal where they will receive no points but which can then be used to perform experiments in later rounds.

Where My Father’s Work differs from most worker placement games is the focus on its story and how it integrates with the game plays. This is provided through two complementary elements: Scenario boxes (containing individualised components and additional cards) and an App which runs alongside the game, providing regular flavour text and plot events as players progress. The App is essential to playing My Father’s Work, so if you are averse to technology in board gaming then this one won’t be for you.

Throughout the game, it offers players extra quests, places to visit, dilemmas and opportunities to vote on village affairs. It will also provide opportunities for more cunning players to work against each other and acts as a catch-up mechanic between generations. As players make their choices, the village itself will alter, offering a varied game state from generation to generation. This is done through a book called the Village Chronicle. The main Village spaces on the board are pages from the Chronicle, which is placed in the centre of the board. As time progresses, players will be instructed to turn to different pages, adding or removing worker spaces as their actions enact subtle (and sometimes not so subtle!) changes in the local area.

It’s… Alive!

The three scenarios provided in the base set are “The Cost of Disease”, “A Time of War” and “Fear of the Unknown”. These each give the story of the game a Thematic setting and direction. The boxes contain components and cards unique to that scenario and my concern initially was that with only three scenarios then gameplay would get repetitive, however, I can honestly say that this has not been the case.

Each scenario has many different forks and branches to explore as the choices made by players affect the story. As an example, I have played “The Cost Of Disease” numerous times and have still not used all the components that come in the box or seen the different pages available in the chronicle. Where the App succeeds, is in transforming a basic Eurogame of moving pieces onto various spaces on a board into a living story about characters in a shifting town, with goals and personalities, albeit megalomaniac and unhinged ones! The quality of the components (which I will touch on later) enhances the immersion and encourages players to make decisions and choices in the spirit of these eccentric characters, rather than simply trying to maximise the efficiency of their turn.

The App text, which is occasionally narrated, is written as a pastiche of Gothic horror novels, and often swings gleefully into parody, often with amusing results. As such, I have frequently made decisions in the game which I know will bite me in the backside sometime in the future, mainly because the consequences for the game and all the players would be very funny. I can honestly say that is not something I would do while playing A Feast for Odin!

Igor…The Switch!

Despite the narrative, My Father’s Work is still a competitive game, and there is a very good worker placement system at play here. Each different type of worker can complete different actions, and this is also very thematic. For example, your caretaker is, presumably, so hideously deformed, that they are not able to be places in town spaces. Servants and spouses can do the sinister Estate actions- but if they do so they are so traumatised that they immediately leave and are lost for the rest of the generation. There is plenty to think about and some lovely shenanigans to be had once you know the gameplay mechanics to get the most out of your pieces and it feels really satisfying. However, strategic purity is not the goal here, and as such the game tends to reply far more random elements than I would normally tolerate in a Eurogame.

In addition to the whims of fate (ie random App events which can reward or punish players with little warning), how players gather knowledge can also be frustratingly hit and miss at times. In My Father’s work, players are aiming to gather knowledge cubes of a specific colour which are generally gained from conducting experiments. To complete experiments they need to harvest resources such as cogs, chemicals and animals which are usually available to anyone, however, the rewards for experiments depend completely on random card draws. This means that if your masterwork, or one of the experiments needed to get there, requires green knowledge and all you keep drawing is yellow…. Well, that feels a bit rubbish. Sometimes there will be the option to gather knowledge from the village, but this is far from guaranteed and it can be disheartening wasting turns cycling through the experiment deck while everyone around you is racking up the victory points.

The Beast Is A Beauty

My Father’s Work is a hefty game that, while it doesn’t rival Gloomhaven for size is still a bit of a monster. The contents however are stunning. I can honestly say that the components for My Father’s Work are probably my favourite for any game. Everything about it says quality: The Artwork is lush and thematic, the flavour text on the experiment cards is both macabre and amusing, the Instruction manual has a lovely matt finish and even the Game Trays provided fit together perfectly to ensure tear down and set up, while not quick, is at least painless and storage should keep everything nice and safe.

The playing components themselves are the real stars, though. Metal coins, screen-printed plastic animals and coffins (to represent er… body parts), metal cogs and gears (to represent…well bigger cogs and gears, presumably), and best of all tiny little glass bottles and cork stoppers. It doesn’t matter what they represent they are adorable. And the playing pieces themselves are wonderfully sculpted, sun-dropped models which add so much character to the game. One very nice touch is that each of the different game roles- scientist, spouse, caretaker or servant- is dictated by the coloured plastic base shapes rather than the models themselves. So whom you choose to be your Scientist and his or her spouse, for instance, is entirely left to the player’s discretion. Hats off to Renegade Games, the quality of the production is superb.

Final Thoughts: Masterpiece Or Monster?

I don’t think it is any coincidence given the subject matter that My Father’s Work is a real Frankenstein’s monster of a game, melding Eurogame mechanics with a narrative flair more suited for dice-chucking action adventures. It is a genuine attempt to make a modern board game more thematically engaging but it is at best a flawed masterpiece and in some key ways just doesn’t achieve its ambition.

My Father’s work definitely provides an enjoyable experience and a variety of gameplay within the three scenarios. However it is still a worker placement game at its core, and the most fun is to be had is in the periods that occur between interactions with the app when trying to compete with opponents for the best spaces available. The story adds flavour and atmosphere, and this is appreciated, but it is the gameplay itself that is genuinely tense and exciting as you move towards the last generation that is most enjoyable.
And unfortunately, too often it is here that the cracks start to show in My Father’s Work. While the story elements are fun and very well thought out, they can quickly start to feel intrusive and frankly far too long. When you are in the home straight trying to work out how you will get enough workers to carry out every action you need before the game ends, being distracted by a random event or plot device inserted between rounds is too often just annoying, especially when the rewards/ penalties are so random. At times like this, the App disrupts rather than enhances the immersion as it takes players away from what they really want to be doing.

The same is true of the flavour text and scene setting throughout the game. While the App provides some genuinely atmospheric and funny story beats, it also bloats the game, turning what should be a 2-hour game into a post three-hour slog. Many times I would look up from reading out another long section of cod-Victorian prose and other players would be counting their resources or looking at their phones. And I can’t blame them. They came for a game night, not for Storytime. If there was simply an option to forward through the longer sections of text and cut out the “fluff” when time was getting short, then this would probably solve many of the issues but not all of them. Unfortunately, currently, no such option exists. And that is a pity, because if it were more streamlined, this would be one I would want to show off as often as possible, especially with new players as it would serve as an excellent, light-hearted gateway to worker placement games.

As it is, My Father’s Work feels more like an interesting and luxurious curiosity of a game. Definitely worth trying, but unlikely to be many players’ first choice for game night unless they have a lot of time and patience to spare.