My Father's Work Review

You could have been an accountant

My Father's Work has players living their best lives by doing heinous experiments and wreaking havoc on the town and forcing your children and their children to continue your work. Some experiments are tame and some are more involved like lycanthropy. Every round, players will take turns placing one of their workers on the ever changing game board with the help of an app that dictates certain events. The worker placement spots are for the most part simple to follow. You'll get some resources (which are stunning to look at) or you can do actions on your player boards like retaining knowledge for the next generation or completing experiments that will score you points and generate resources. Whenever everyone has placed their workers or passed, the round ends and the board will reset. This happens for 3 generations, or 9 rounds total. When a new generation begins, you'll lose most of your knowledge and resources, unless you've retained some or have rooms in your manor that will let you keep stuff. The player with the most points will be the winner.

I mentioned the use of an app to help drive the game and for most that may be a deterrent but it works really well. It's not too intrusive to gameplay beyond occasionally stopping to resolve a story point or help to setup for the next round. It reminds you of a lot of things you may forget and provides a decent bit of ambiance with the music and sound effects. It had minimal lag and I never had any sort of technical issues while using it.

The Good: Immediately, the components are what will draw you into this game. There's so many metal bits and screen printed wooden pieces. Also, there's glass jars. I'm too afraid to fill them but everyone I know has put stuff in them and it looks incredible. The minis are really nice, but I do wish there was more variety between models. The overall gameplay is well done. It's a very well thought out concept and the game plays smoothly for as involved as it can be at times. The included scenarios are all different enough to want to play through them all and there's a decent bit of variety in the core gameplay to try out different strategies in each game. The use of a spiral bound book for the main map of the game is phenomenal. It shows expansion without needing too much unnecessary cardboard or bloat.

The Okay: The game can absolutely run longer than you may plan for it to. Each scenario advertises itself as 180 minutes and it's a pretty accurate estimation. The app is a huge strength but also a big weakness to the game. There is so much reading and narration involved prior to rounds and game setup that it adds a lot of that time on it's own. If you know what's going on or don't really care about story, I suppose you could skip it to move things along but it'll break immersion.

The Not So Good: After playing a few games and each scenario, you'll feel like you've seen pretty much everything there is to see with My Fathers Work. Sure, there's other strategies to play but the secrets are not new anymore. There's only so many times you can play a game until it gets a little stale. The cost of entry is a lot. At $125 you'll need to get a lot of plays out of the game to justify the cost. I wish there was a less deluxified version for players who may not have the cash or want to spend that much on a game to be able to discover this.

Final Thoughts: My Fathers Work is a huge game with a ton of unique ideas and concepts. It's dripping with theme and it has one of the best app integrations that I've come across for a board game. It's not a perfect game by any means but if you've got the group and some comfortable chairs there's a lot to love. It's charm lies in its story and there's enough engagement each round that the only real downtime is going to happen during the story points and round changes. I absolutely can recommend this game for its overall uniqueness alone.

Thanks to Renegade Games for providing a review copy.