Satisfactory: The Board Game Preview

Automation and factory-building games have become pretty popular over the past few years, with Coffee Stain Studios’ Satisfactory being one of the stars of the genre. I have always admired the sprawling conveyor belts and mega structures of the factory-building powerhouse from a comfortable distance, dipping my toe into the waters with messy (but kind of functional) factories of my own. Soon, factory builders will have a whole new way to build out their process, as Mood Publishing, the same publisher behind Hitman: The Board Game, is looking to bring the beloved factory sim to your tabletop with Satisfactory: The Board Game and the launch of their latest crowdfunding campaign over on Gamefound. We were sent an early prototype copy to check out, in addition to playing a demo with the game’s designer, David Thor Fjalarsson, to see if a tabletop game can capture and refine the Satisfactory experience down to the size of a kitchen table-sized factory.

In Satisfactory: The Board Game (referred to simply as “Satisfactory” going forward), designed by David Thor Fjalarsson, up to four players will have to mine, refine, and upgrade their factories in an effort to earn the most FICSIT points before the space elevator is finished. The turns themselves are surprisingly straightforward; on your turn, you will perform two actions, either build something, move around the map, or have your factory do its work. Once each player has taken their turn, the production phase occurs, where everyone’s mines will activate, drilling for one of the three basic materials—limestone, iron, or copper—and existing materials will move down their conveyors towards getting refined into better resources. Then, the whole cycle repeats itself. Even in my first game, by the time my group had reached the second or third round, we had the flow down.

The game itself takes place on a large hex-grid representation of the video game’s massive world, with random creatures and biomes that get placed during setup, along with various material-rich points where mines can be placed. The “Move” action is pretty self-explanatory, allowing you to move your piece up to a number of spaces equal to your movement value, with some spaces that can only be crossed once certain technologies or vehicles have been built. Landing on a point can grant you resources, or allow you to claim one of the tokens mentioned earlier. If you prefer to get some extra work in at your factories, you can instead opt for the “Workshop” action, which lets you either move a beltline of resources down a spot or refine a single block of material into a higher-tier version, which is a crucial component for when you build.

Speaking of building things, the “Build” action was my favorite, and what I would consider the core thing to do in this game. At any time, players will have access to build their staple devices—extractors, refineries, et cetera—in addition to a random pool of cards of varying tiers that get unlocked over the course of the game. These cards, like the Jet Pack to help you get around quicker or weapons to tackle the wildlife, are a great help, but the main structures you can construct have an added little treat to them. Depending on what you build, you will have a bonus action that you can take, determined by what you have built. Building a miner, for instance, will allow you to immediately build a Belt, which will then trigger the Belt’s bonus, giving you a free movement action, or the Constructor, giving you an extra action you can take on your turn. Stringing together these bonuses to create some wild turns was some of the most fun I had playing Satisfactory.

When it comes to playing, Satisfactory’s tabletop adaptation has opted for a competitive “race for points” experience for its main game, instead of the cooperative focus from the PC title — though the promised final game will include a co-op and solo modes as well. That said, don’t expect to be bombing or taking out the other players’ extractors and belts with some cardboard corporate terrorism within the game. Instead, once a player has claimed a tile by building something on it, no other player can develop on it, though they can still cross over with no issue. Satisfactory can still be “mean,” but it’s more like cleverly getting in the way or making expansion for your opponents annoying as opposed to turning the planet into a battlefield.

This sort of headbutting really only comes out when you start getting to the three- or four-player counts. At two players, because both players have so much more space, I was surprised and impressed with how different Satisfactory manages to feel. During my two-player game, with far less worry about my factory getting locked in by other players, I instead was able to focus and work out how best I wanted to try and optimize (as optimized as you could get in a game like this after only a couple plays) my system. It honestly felt like I was playing different games based on the player counts, with two players focusing on optimizing and planning out turns to maximize earning points, while with three, and especially four, figuring out how best to expand my factory and balancing blocking resources from the others was much more in the forefront of my mind. Oddly enough, I think I actually enjoyed the puzzley nature of the lower player count more, as both of us weren’t forced into conflict with one another, and I could better test out what Satisfactory offers.

In one two-player game, I focused on maxing out my basic resource production, getting all of my extractors online as fast as I could, and expanding my reach to a few farther-out “rich” tiles, which further let me produce more of the resource during production phases. Having an almost overabundance of these cheaper resources allowed me to quickly gobble up and complete the early-game Milestones, netting me a bunch of points and rocketing me out into the lead, faster than the elevator could take me. During one particularly memorable event, thanks to the rewards given by completing the goals and what I had earned from various Biomes I visited that turn, I was able to complete four of the Milestones back-to-back-to-back. It was a straight dopamine shot to the system, and basically sold me on Satisfactory alone.

I, admittedly, approached Satisfactory from the viewpoint of someone who hasn’t sunk all that many hours into the game that it has been adapted from, but even this condensed package still manages to FEEL like Satisfactory. Watching my pathways of conveyor belts expand outwards across the map, discovering alternate recipes, and building the network of machines to allow me to continue to refine my goods and open up new technologies is still all here. Even memorable critters like Bean are here. There are plenty of other nods that longtime players will pick up on better than I, but I applaud the designers for still managing to make this feel like Satisfactory at its heart. The tabletop adaptation obviously can’t replicate the massive, near-limitless scale of the PC game, but it looks to have successfully mined what matters most: building an efficient system and then riding it until you need to upgrade it to reach loftier heights.

If there is one thing that interested builders should be aware of, it is that Satisfactory is not a small game. It requires a good bit of table space to play, and it will assault you with icons. When its multiple boards, piles of cards, large play board, and resource tokens are all laid out, this is a surprisingly imposing tabletop experience. Some smart decisions, such as keeping the material types down to just three, do help keep you from being overwhelmed by resource management, thankfully. Frankly, keeping track of and remembering what all the icons meant was more of a hassle than managing my stockpiles of colored cubes.

Different icons appear all over the place, on cards, on the map, the player boards, and even the victory point track, and at least in the prototype I had, it did not come with a player reference card. Thankfully, I’ve been assured there is one that will come with the release copy, which should alleviate some of that headache of keeping track of what means what. It took the better part of the game to grasp the icons, but by the end, it did start clicking, and again, much of that pain will be lessened with the inclusion of a reference card.

Satisfactory: The Board Game is still being tweaked and adjusted, but Mood appears to have succeeded in shrinking down the complex factory-building game and distilling it down to its raw materials to create a surprisingly approachable (if not a bit intimidating-looking) board game. The limited action choices you have on your turn help keep turns quick and snappy, but I can certainly see how, if you have a tendency to hyper-analyze your turns or have to make the most optimized play, turns could easily take a bit longer. Regardless, the implementation here, adapting so many systems while still being a game that doesn’t take all day to play (my games usually lasted 2 – 3.5 hours), is impressive. Thankfully, before backing the game, a draft version of the rules has been posted along with the full list of add-ons and what is included in the pledge tiers over on the Gamefound page. Or, better yet, you and your game group can try it for yourselves in Tabletop Simulator on Steam using an official preview build mod made by MOOD! Now, back to trying to figure out how to build my own mega factory.