How Nucleum Powers Up Board Game Night

Welcome to this week’s gaming post! This week I’m discussing a heavy, economic euro game that I recently did an unboxing for. Be prepared to strap in because I have a lot of thoughts on this game, so without further ado, let’s jump into the recent highlights.

Nucleum is a euro game focused around placing and powering up buildings. The game is often compared to Brass, but outside of some loose similarities with building tiles and creating networks, the gameplay between the two games is very different. The main mechanism in Nucleum revolves around network tiles that have two actions printed on each. Every turn, players may choose to either take a normal turn, resolving the two actions on the tile, or place the tile on the map to expand their network and create connections. Each tile also has a color associated to each of the two actions, and if the player matches that tile up with a city or another tile of the same color on the map, that player gets to carry out the two actions on the tile. The caveat is that the tile stays on the map for the rest of the game, whereas tiles used during normal turns can be used again after the player performs a recharge action (essentially a rest/production turn).

This leads me into my favorite part of the game which are these multi-use tiles. If you’re someone that felt that Brass’ card system was restrictive, then you’ll likely enjoy the more openness that these tiles provide. Also, in contrast to Brass, networks are more open, and there’s a greater opportunity to leverage other players’ connections and expand to cities further from your existing routes. These multi-use tiles also lead to a lot of tense decision-making. For example, say I really need to expand my network to another part of the map, and I have a tile that matches both sides. However, doing so would mean that I have no other tiles available with one or both of those actions, meaning that I would have to purchase more tiles before I could take that action again. This leads to tough a choice on figuring out when to let that tile go. One caveat here is that this does sometimes lead to analysis paralysis (AP), so if you’re someone who is prone to AP, be warned.

As mentioned earlier, I also really enjoyed that the route-building doesn’t feel as punishing, and there’s less of a chance that another player cuts you off. Players are able to use other players’ routes when energizing buildings, and players may place rail tiles on any free space on the map without the restriction of expanding from your existing connections. Therefore, if you really want access to a certain city, there’s almost always a way to create that network.

One of the key ways that players score points is by energizing buildings. Every time a player powers up a building, they receive achievement tokens corresponding to the number of energy produced. When a player rests, they spend those tokens to place a star on the milestone track, which acts as a multiplier for end game scoring conditions with higher levels on the track providing a larger multiplier. There’s also a restriction where a player can only place one star within each tier. In a way, this feels a bit similar to deliveries in Great Western Trail. Rest too early and you won’t have a chance to accumulate enough achievement tokens to place a star higher up on the track; so figuring out the correct timing is imperative later in the game.

Finally, while this is certainly a complex game that required a couple of plays before I fully understood all of its moving pieces, the turns and actions themselves are fairly straightforward. The energize action is by far the most confusing, but all of the other actions are relatively easy to understand. Most involve either spending resources to place a building or tile on the map, buying a new railway tile, or taking a contract. Once I was able to get going, most turns were pretty quick, other than the occasional slowdown due to AP as I mentioned earlier. The player aids are also very detailed, and I found that I didn’t have to check the rules that often other than to clarify the meaning of a particular icon.

Moving onto a few of the downsides. First up are the technologies. While some of them can be very exciting and a few provide nice one-time rewards, overall I found the technologies themselves to be a tad underwhelming. Every game, players get eight different technologies that they can unlock throughout the game, and there are four different sets (there is some slight overlap between some of them), so they do change up from game to game. However, I was never that excited when I got to unlock one besides maybe the eighth technology that can provide a lot of victory points at the end provided you’ve satisfied the requirements. Most ongoing technologies only provide slight benefits, such as an extra resource when you do a certain action. Also, since those are fairly minor benefits, it can sometimes be difficult to remember to get your bonus when they’re triggered, especially once you’ve unlocked a few different ones. Overall, I found the technologies to be a bit hit-or-miss, and I think there’s definitely an opportunity to further refine them; for example, potentially reducing the overall number down from eight but making each one is more impactful could help entice players to seek out contracts more.

The contracts themselves also have a bit of luck. There’s always four available at any given time that players can take through the contract action; once one is selected, it’s replaced with one from a stack that is randomly determined during setup. This means that other than the three purple contracts that stay out until a player completes one of them, it’s very hard to plan for which contracts will come out in a given game and at what time. For example, say I’ve decided to focus on one of the three different building types, but then a contract for building a certain number of those buildings never comes out. Alternatively, a contract could come out that perfectly aligns with what a player has done up until that point, without any prior knowledge or planning around that objective. While this hasn’t been a huge issue in the games I’ve played so far, for a game that puts a huge focus on forward planning, this randomness feels out of place.

I’ve had a chance to try out the solo mode a couple of times, and the AI does a fairly good job of simulating a human player. An AI’s turn consists of rolling a dice which determines which tile will be played before following a decision tree to figure out what actions the AI will perform. This means that the AI is fairly smart, but there’s also a fair bit of piloting needed compared to other solo modes I’ve played. This is by no means the most complex AI ever (I’ve actually heard that it’s fairly light for a Dávid Turczi design), but it’s more involved than just flipping a card and doing whichever action is on the card. Personally, the most challenging part is that since the AI’s turns are a bit more involved, it’s a bit difficult to switch my brain back and forth, especially with some of the AP involved with planning your own turns. If I’m really itching to get the game played, the solo mode does a decent job, but overall I think I’ll more often play this game multiplayer.

The box says the game plays between 1 to 2.5 hours, but that’s definitely a bit optimistic when you include the game’s setup. This game has quite a bit of setup involved, including parts where you have to randomly select a certain number of tiles and then mix them all together with a different type. The setup is particularly puzzling – some setup is printed on the board (i.e. how many contracts at different player counts), but other key parts of setup, like how many neutral cards to turn over and evaluate or how many coins and workers a player should start with, are missing. This means that even with some of these reminders, I’ll most likely still need to pull out the rules and go through the three pages of setup to remind myself of all the steps.

I also have mixed feelings on the art and components. First up, the dual-layer player boards are nice since all of the buildings, mines, and turbines slide into their own spots. And while there are indents for your contracts and tiles, the ones for the tiles are fairly small which makes me nervous about the possibility of them snapping off. The bigger issue are the technology boards. Once you unlock a technology, you’re supposed to be able to slide it in and have it snap into place. However, I’ve had mixed success getting all of the tiles to fit in without the board expanding, and again I’m worried about the long narrow pieces getting snapped. The game also comes with an insert that you have to assemble, but I wasn’t able to find any instructions in the box about how to actually put it together, so I had to revert to scouring BGG forums to figure out how others put it together. Even then, the insert doesn’t do a great of helping organize the components, and I’m tempted to pull the insert out and just use bags to organize the components.

This post is already longer than my normal posts when I only cover one game, but I hope that helps illustrate my mixed feelings on the game. On the one hand, I really enjoy the multi-use tiles and the interesting decision making, but on the other, there are still some elements of the game that I feel like could have been further refined. Overall, I have really enjoyed my time with Nucleum; however, there are still some elements of the game that hold it back from reaching the highs of other heavy economic euro games like Brass.

With that, I’ll wrap up this week’s gaming highlights! I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the games I’ve mentioned, future content, or format in the comments section below. Happy gaming!

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