Impressions of Infernal Contraptions by Privateer Press
If you’ve read this site for any period of time, you’ve probably heard me talk about how cool I think Privateer Press‘ miniatures look. Their WARMACHINE miniatures are some of the coolest looking miniatures being cast today, and whoever does their paint work makes me very, very jealous. I also like the mechanics of WARMACHINE based on the demos I’ve played in the past. Having said all that, I don’t own WARMACHINE or any of their miniatures. That’s because I’ve already invested in at least two or three other miniatures games, and those miniatures, and still haven’t painted or played with any of them. So I decided I won’t buy any more until I’ve made use of what I have.
When Privateer began talking about its “Infernal Contraption” card game, I couldn’t help but be curious about it. I saw it on the Origins schedule this year and decided to try it.
Infernal Contraption is described as a “stand-alone card game where goblin mechanics race to assemble nigh-uncontrollable magical machines.” That’s the concept. You’re a goblin engineer trying to build the best machine you can.
At the start of the game, each player has a hand containing 7 cards, a “parts pile” containing lots more of the same cards, and a card on the table in front of them called a “power core”. Some cards contain “contraptions” or devices which make your machine do something. Other cards contain “power cores” which provide power to the contraptions in your machine. Each contraption must make contact with a power core in order to function. “Upgrade” cards can be attacked to contraptions to make them better. Other cards have a one-time effect that occurs when the contraption is activated. With “Infernal Contraption 2” you also add Sabotage cards which damage an opponent’s machine. (The good news is that this isn’t a “collectible” card game. If you buy a set, you get all the cards. If you buy the expansion, you get all those cards in one set. None of that irritating sifting through boxes of cards to get what you want.)
There’s a little more to the mechanics than this, but that’s enough to understand the game. On each turn, you play a card from your hand onto your machine (or an opponent’s in the case of Sabotage cards). After you’ve placed all the cards you want to play, you attempt to activate your machine. You do this by reading the cards in order from top to bottom, left to right, down the machine. If a contraption card is powered and not sabotaged, you do what it says.
The object of the game is to get your opponents to run out of cards in their “parts piles” without doing so yourself. The cards you place into your machine will force your opponents to do things like draw cards from their parts piles into their hands, allow you to remove cards from the scrap pile (discard pile in the center of the table) to your hand or parts pile, etc.
Strategic use of your cards can make all the difference. I ended up losing the game because I didn’t read a sabotage card clearly enough. It finished off my dwindling parts pile when it activated. The sad part was that I had a card that would have “undone” the sabotage, but I wasn’t worried about it because all the earlier sabotage cards just deactivated the attached contraption and I knew I could win without that one. If I’d disabled that sabotage card, I’m positive I’d have taken one of my opponents down. The other one wasn’t a threat. (In the end, that guy “won” the event because the guy who was actually still standing was the GM.)
Infernal Contraption is an easy game to learn. Young children could very easily pick it up, I think. Still, there is enough strategy in it to keep adults interested as well. My only complain about the game, and this is a very minor one, is that it requires a lot of space on the table for each player. As the game progresses, you’re adding more and more devices to your machine (i.e., laying more cards on the table). By design, devices and power cores can only be added to the machine by matching the top or bottom edges (the sides are reserved for upgrades and sabotages). This means that your machine becomes very long. Even if you split it up into multiple lines, it still consumes a lot of table space. My machine at the end of the game, end to end, was roughly as long as my arm span.