Nucleum Review

“OMG, it’s Brass: Birmingham mixed with a bit of Barrage!”. You’ve probably already heard Nucleum described this way if you’ve spoken to anyone about it. I should know, it was my first reaction after I played a hush-hush prototype copy at Airecon 2023 (which I wasn’t allowed to show photos of), and it’s how I described it to anyone who’d listen to me.

While it’s still a valid comparison it’s important to know two important things before we go any further. Firstly there are still a lot of things in Nucleum which aren’t directly from either of the namechecked games. Secondly, and most importantly, this isn’t just a case of someone saying “What if we take these two things and smoosh them together. That’ll work, right?”. So often in entertainment what looks like a good idea on paper turns out to be less than the sum of its parts. So while Audioslave just sounded like Chris Cornell singing over Tom Morello’s guitar, and was in all ways lesser than Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine (musical taste of my youth dating me here), Nucleum is a peanut butter and bacon sandwich. Both are great sandwich fillings in their own right, but when you put them together – wow.

A night on the tiles

The concept of Nucleum is powering homes and businesses in an alternate universe 19th-century central Europe. Uranium has been discovered as a great way to heat water and power steam turbines, so it’s your job as budding industrialists to harness the power, supply the power, and make a buttload of money at the same time. A lot of this is done in the game by forming networks to get power from one place to another, be that coal or nuclear power. If you’ve played the Brass games you’ll immediately see the biggest similarity here. Instead of building canals and railways however, it’s only ever tracks you lay down, and Brass’ biggest seismic shock – the mid-game removal of network links – is gone.

The really clever thing in Nucleum is that the tiles you lay down on the board to make the connections between cities are the same tiles that you use to take actions. One side of the tile is the railway line and on the other, you’ve got two actions, one on either end of the tile. You very quickly realise that you’ve got tricky choices to make all of the time. If you play a tile for the two actions on it, you place it in the next available slot above your player board, making a line of tiles from left to right. Your income markers move left to right on tracks immediately below your played tiles. When you take an income action you get to take whatever your income tracks show, but only as far along as you have tiles. More tiles played equals more potential income, right?

At the same time though, those tiles you’re placing above your board to take actions and get income are the same tiles you need to flip to place on the board as railway links. Each end of the tile has a colour on it, and the cities have colours on them too. When you place a railway, if the colours at either end match you get to take those actions before flipping it to the railway side, which is a nice bonus, but then that tile is stuck on the board for the rest of the game. You can buy more tiles with the money you make from income actions, but in order to make the most money, you need those tiles to be above your board, not on the main board. With a nod to games like Concordia, you can get your tiles back to use again, but you waste a turn doing it.

Quite the puzzle, isn’t it?

A competitive market

What makes games like Brass or Simone’s Barrage or Lorenzo Il Magnifico so much fun is the level of competition inherent in them. Network-building is especially good for driving competition in board games because it forces players to compete for the same things. Ticket To Ride has us building railway lines. Barrage is about directing water downhill. Brass gets players making sure they can get fuel to their factories. Nucleum does the same thing and it keeps that same slight anxiety when you start building a multi-part railway. Some players are just waiting for someone to start one so that they can jump in and finish the links, depriving you of any placement bonuses while simultaneously upsetting potential plans you had for those bonuses.

I dislike referring to Brass so much in this review, but it’s a necessary evil. The biggest difference in the way these two games feel to play comes as a result of that mid-game reset in Brass. All of a sudden all of your previous network just disappears from the board, and it can leave ill-prepared players with no way to get coal to their buildings. Nucleum feels very different. It’s a case of build, build, build, all the way to the end of the game. Some people will love that, some will prefer Brass’ way of doing things. Different strokes for different folks. I love Brass, but I love Nucleum too. It’s similar, just different.

The market for extra action tiles is really interesting. Occasionally tiles will pop out into view which perfectly align with your strategy. The feeling of “Don’t you dare take that before I can” is super present, and I love it. On the flip side of this though is the fact that sometimes you just won’t get a chance to get the tiles you want. You desperately want to replace an action you’ve turned into a railway tile, or something comes out with coloured ends which perfectly match a final link for you, but someone else takes it. Them’s the breaks. Contingency is something you’ll quickly learn to build.

Another thing I particularly like is how important each player’s player board is in the game. In many games with a heavily contested main board, the player board acts as not much more than somewhere to store the stuff that belongs to you. In Nucleum it’s so much more. When you gain technologies during the game you can plug in the jigsaw-like pieces hanging off the edge of your board to gain immediate and/or ongoing benefits, as well as end-game scoring opportunities. Choosing which buildings and turbines to build affects what you get and when, as does claiming contracts and plugging them into the side of your board. Keeping your attention on your own board, the main board, and even your opponents’ boards to keep abreast of what they’re doing, is tricky, but compulsive.

This game is so good.

Final thoughts

This review was a long time coming, and with good reason. I loved my first play and was super excited for the rest of the year waiting for it to arrive. I’m not immune to the power of hype though, so as is usual for me, I waited for the hype to die down and to play the game enough times enough to cast a critical eye over it. I’m glad I did, because after the initial glee and hype I had a little lull where I thought maybe I was convincing myself I liked it more than I really did. Now, however, with time on my side, I can honestly say that Nucleum is an excellent game.

It suffers from the same things many of Board&Dice’s heavy Euro games do, but that’s got to be expected. It’s a tricky game to teach, and it takes at least a couple of plays to understand how to see your strategy through to the end of the game. If the person you’re teaching has played Brass then it helps, but otherwise just understand that you might need to do some hand-holding in those first games. Making sure someone understands whether they can get coal to those early buildings for example, can mean the difference between someone having a good time or leaving with a bitter taste in their mouth.

It’s a pretty fiddly game too, and the attempt at a game insert that comes in the box went straight in the bin. I highly recommend you leave the technology tiles locked into place when you pack it away. It’s nightmare-inducing how thin and potentially breakable the cardboard arms are without them. Other than that Nucleum really is special. The asymmetric player boards, the variable setup, the way every single game with have a different initial state means it’s not something you’re going to naturally intuit right away for a long time.

Nucleum is a polished, well-produced, heavy Euro game of the highest order. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking “I wish I had another game that scratches that Brass itch”, then Nucleum is that game. Far from being detracting, or calling it derivative and a copycat because of the countless Brass comparisons that I and others have made, look upon this as the highest compliment I can bestow on it. When you’re constantly being namechecked in the same sentence as BGG’s number one game of all time, you’re doing something right. Bravo Simone & Dávid.

Review copy kindly provided by Board&Dice. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

---

---