Gizmos Overview and Review

a few years ago the game splendour came out it made a big splash and people were really diggin the game but one thing I didn't really dig about it was and after you play it two or three times it's the same game over and over again well this game I'm gonna talk about today is very similar splendor but has a little bit of replayability to it so let's talk about gizmos [Music] the finest minds of our generation are gathering together at the great Science Fair competing to be named the greatest crazy inventor guy of the year on your turn you get to take a single action first you can file you can take one of the gizmos from the main display and file it away to be built later or you can pick take one of the six energy spheres available in the dispenser and put it in your energy containment ring or you can build spend energy spheres to build one of the gizmos from the display or one you have on file and lastly you can research draw cards from the gizmo deck and choose one of them to build many of the gizmos that you build have functions on them that can be triggered by taking one of the previous four actions and then others might trigger from those actions and this can create a chain reaction of additional actions furthermore many gizmos have upgrades or conversion properties that allow you to draw more cards convert energy into other cards and so on after any player has built their fourth level 3 gizmo the round will end in the player's tally up the points on their gizmos and the inventor with the most points is crowned the greatest and most inventive crazy inventor of the great science fair so I opened up by saying that this one reminds me a lot of splendor I mean there's basically the same core concept here you collect a currency as an action you spend that currency as an action to take a card gives your victory points and the cards that you collect give you a little bit of an easier time getting cards in the future so that exact same thing happens in gizmos but there's one major difference that I think makes gizmos a superior game it's the added element of the chaining of effects this is so cool and thematically it's fantastic I mean they got like the whole science fair theme you got that awesome looking dispenser with marbles coming out the bottom which is a difference in itself and I'll get to that in a minute but the concept of chaining actions together once you build a gizmo that gives you an additional benefit to taking certain actions and you can start to change those things together almost indefinitely at that point if you continue to buy more and more cards and put them on the same actions it makes it very very fun to put together a real thriving engine in this game I love engine building games I particularly like them in heavier euro games where you're putting together an engine and it's you you watch that engine run turn after turn this is on the lighter side of that spectrum but it still has the concept of building an engine the chaining so you take an action you get to pick another marble you get to pick a random marble in depending on the color of that one you get to pick another one you can build us something actually all kinds of cool stuff with the actions and how that all changed together really really dig that and I think that's where the replayability comes in and with this game you have the options to control what you do in the game you can control where those cards go which cards you buy and how they benefit your strategy I think this one's neat because it hits kind of two ends of the spectrum you can play this with a family and they can sort of frivolously build an engine and just see what happens build little mousetrap and see what happens and hopefully you do a good job and it's still a fun game you're playing it like splendor only are getting a benefit here and there or you can play it on the other side of the coin which is a more hobbyist side where you're really focusing in on how you can build a really good efficient machine and each time you take those actions you get a whole bunch of resources or you get like some extra victory point tokens or something like that you can focus down on certain kinds of aspects of the game so you could play it on a heavier end or a lighter end so I think that one really fits a niche for people who are heavier gamers like myself who play with families who are more casual like myself now one of the things that I think really helps make this game work in that respect is when you're playing a game like splendor you have all of the the poker chips out there all the colors you could just take anything you want there's nothing stopping you other than somebody hoarding them all of course but in this one there's a limited supply of the various colors that come out of the dispenser so only certain ones might be available to you in the moment so I think that makes these engines work a lot better because you have to build version aspects to your little gizmos so that you can get yellows when you don't have yellows or blues when you don't have blues and convert this to that and this blue becomes too because there wasn't enough of them that actually adds a lot more to the game as well it's a random series of colors coming out of that dispenser that's a really neat edition of the game that adds to your engine building now I mentioned splendor again of course I keep going back to splendor because this game is very much like splendor well with this game the replayability is obviously a little more in my opinion because there's an added element to the game but I will say that despite there being more replayability I don't think there's tons of replayability and that's because I don't think each one of the cards and their abilities that activate are really all that exciting I was actually kind of disappointed when I went through the cards to look what all was possible there's a lot of conversion stuff this color to that color there's a lot of picked extra marbles out of the dispenser or random ones out of the top there is get victory point tokens there was additional drawers and additional you know files and that kind of stuff all of that kind of basic stuff but there wasn't anything really all that exciting there weren't like special ones that had special abilities that you could get that would trigger something really cool to happen none of that at all it's all very basic upgrades to your little engine and I don't know if it's a balancing thing that that did you chose not to add extra stuff or or it didn't fit the game designer and made it too complex I'm not sure why but when I was looking at him I was disappointed so I think your engines are gonna feel very similar when you build them of course you can sort of strategically focus certain things but I still feel like after maybe like five to ten different plays you're gonna be like well yeah I did it I built all the engines that there are to build so though it has more replayability and splendor and I would very much rather play this than splendor I still feel like there's kind of low on the replayability side all that said I did find it fun I think it was a cool game it was pleasurable to pull the marbles out I liked the concept of marbles and you had to put them in your little circle so they don't roll away and that's your energy containment field I like that whole concept I like the concept of building the engine like the concept of watching the engine happened so short-term I think this is a very good game and I think it would be a lot of fun for your families and I think it's one that you could take out as a filler game at your game nights too with your other hobby friends so if this sounds interesting to you check out gizmos thanks so much for joining me here for my review today of gizmos if you like board games card games miniatures games role-playing games why don't you check out our audio podcast you can find it at the secret cabal comm 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