Welcome to Encyclopedia! The year is 1739, and as aspiring naturalists and adventurers, you’ve been hired by the Comte de Buffon - Darwin's predecessor - to help him create the first encyclopedia of natural history. To do so, you’ll be conducting research, organizing ambitious expeditions and publishing studies of the world’s most fascinating creatures!
Encyclopedia is a dice-based worker placement game. At the beginning of each round, you’ll be drawing and rolling dice, then placing them on your player board. These dice can then be used to perform an action each turn, depending on their color and value. Your action can be preparing your expeditions by going to the Embassy, visiting the Bank to raise funds, or hiring your research team at the University. Once you’re ready to go, you’ll choose the Animal cards you wish to study, then organize expeditions to observe them in their natural habitats. When your research is complete, you’ll then be able to publish your findings in an attempt to become the biggest contributor to Buffon’s Encyclopedia. Every publication you make will earn you Victory points, and at the end of the game, you’ll score points based on collections of Animals and research amassed during play. The naturalist with the most points wins!
Encyclopedia was designed by Olivier Melison and Eric Dubus, the authors of Dominations: Road to Civilization and Museum. This expert worker placement game brings some fascinating new twists to the genre, offering multiple paths to victory. The game also offers a multitude of ways to counter the random element of your dice rolls. As well as being able to spend different tokens to change the value or color of a die, players have more than just their own dice to choose from, as other players dice can also be used! Taking a die from another player’s board does not cost anything, but the targeted player gains a bonus.
The game’s beautiful theme - with gorgeously illustrated animal cards - ties in strongly with its mechanics, making the rules easy to grasp so that you can jump straight in to devising the perfect strategy.
—description from the publisher
- Stellar artwork and table presence; high-quality components
- Engaging engine-building via experts and cards
- Delightful bag and large, appealing board setup
- Solo mode included and functional
- Rulebook is wordy and sometimes glosses over actions; difficult to teach
- End-game scoring and 'collection' definitions are unclear without external references
- Graphic design and reference aids are insufficient, causing confusion during play
- Scaling with players is weird; 4-player games can exceed two hours, and 2-player scale is tight
- Some cards and seals create strong asymmetries, unbalancing the experience; balance questionable
- Scientific data collection and taxonomy
- Global wildlife research and cataloging of animal species
- Abstract, data-driven with negligible thematic storytelling
- Wingspan
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Action economy and color/value interactions — Dice colors and values influence how actions score and what bonuses you can trigger; color alignment matters for some actions
- card tableau building — Collect animal cards to build a tableau with types, continents, and terrains forming the basis of scoring and combos
- Dice drafting and placement — Roll dice at the start of a turn, then place them on your personal board; taking a die can give an opponent a bonus via their die icon
- Resource management — Use coins, expedition tokens, and seals to boost dice values and actions, with experts providing specialized bonuses
- Set collection and publication — Publish findings by choosing a set of cards; end-game scoring rewards having lots of cards from the same continent and category collections
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- It's basically a kind of in a sense a card Tableau game
- Encyclopedia is fine but flawed
- The game looks great on the table
- It's a very one-tracked game; very focused on a single strategy
- I give this one a six out of ten
References (from this video)
- Accessible weight for a mid-weight euro
- Easy to remember rules after playing
- Fun art and components
- Compiling animal facts in an encyclopedia
- Biology / zoological knowledge theme
- Educational yet approachable
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- dice worker placement — Dice workers perform actions to gather animal cards and research information.
- dice-driven optimization — Yields and endgame can be optimized by planning dice use.
- research/encyclopedia filling — Place cubes to represent species characteristics and complete research tasks.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- the rules are quick and easy to get through
- my daughter really likes birds
- the game uses the game trays making it a lot better easier to set up and take down
- one of the best components that I've ever seen
References (from this video)
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- The two by the way was Kingdoms for Lauren which is actually I think liked by others but I felt that you had to break your teeth on the rules to get to a game that was a whole lot of messiness.
- I really did not love Kingdoms for Lauren but I respect that it's a game that will work for others.
- The highest the highest individual score given out in 2022. So that's the 3.5 is the most common rating given.
References (from this video)
- Safe to keep
- Speaker loves it
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- set collection — Players collect thematic elements to score points; modular drafting implied by the cataloged encyclopedia.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- I will not be going through campaign games in this.
- I want to be more cutthroat than I ever have before.
- Quad Heroes is going. I hate it. I hate it so much.
- Monumental. If Monumental is still here in a year and hasn't been played, if next year's Purge, if I haven't played Monumental, it's going to go.
- Last Light can go. I'm not thinking off the shelf.