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By: Kim and Devin
November 2, 2022
Overview
My Father’s Work is a narrative worker placement game for 2-4 players. The game is app-driven, so a smartphone or tablet is required to play. The game follows the descendants of a mad scientist, and their descendants, and so on.
Each round, players will take turns placing one of their workers in town or on their estate to gather resources, complete experiments, upgrade their estate, record knowledge, manage their sanity, and influence the public’s perception. At the end of a round, all workers are returned to the players, any story events are resolved, and a new round begins. After three rounds, the current generation ends (your scientist dies!), and most of their existing resources and work is lost to time, leaving behind only the estate and what little research that survives between generations. At the start of the next generation, there will be a continuation of the overarching narrative, along with new twists introduced from past decisions. Then, play begins again for three rounds. After three full generations, the players tally up any extra final points, and the player with the most points is the most prestigious (infamous? awful?) scientist!
The box comes with three main scenarios to play through, each featuring branching paths, side stories, special rules, and eight different endings, for a total of 24 different endings!
Throughout the game, the app is used to make story choices, manage secret voting, and interact with other special mechanics. It will also display narrative text for players to read to set the mood, give hints on the possible outcomes of certain actions, and give players information about what new mechanics come into play. While the text at the start of generations is voiced, the rest of the text relies on the players to read on their own.
Thoughts
🔴Kim🔴
One of the biggest draws for Devin and I to back this game on Kickstarter was that one of the designers of Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein, a game that we both loved, also worked on this game. My Father’s Work is a great game that offers a really immersive narrative experience. I know the need for an app is divisive for a lot of people, including me at first, but I think it was implemented well and the background music really adds to the mood.
One of my favorite game mechanics is worker placement, so to me this was combining the best of both worlds of a worker placement game and a big narrative game, because I’m used to narrative games being dungeon crawlers. There are a lot of big decisions to make with a limited number of workers each turn. It’s a very tight game where you need to be strategic in the actions you decide to take. I like when I won’t be able to do everything I want before the round ends. It makes the actions feel like they matter more than when I can complete everything without a lot of planning.
This is one of my favorite games of 2022, and if any of this gameplay piques your interest, I recommend giving it a try!
🟣Devin🟣
Before I get into it, I want to say that I really, really like this game, and I highly recommend it to anyone that is even a little bit interested in what it has to offer.
My Father’s Work aims to deliver a deluxe experience from the moment you open the box. From the gold leaf lettering on the front of the Village Chronicle (the book you’ll be flipping through between generations to change the main map) to the varied shapes of its metal gears and wooden animal pieces, it’s plain to see that production value is top-notch.
My Father’s Work does a lot to blend a traditional Euro-style worker placement game with a narrative experience more akin to a dungeon crawler like Descent: Journeys in the Dark or Mansions of Madness. For example, if you allow your mental health to decay unchecked in favor of the immediate benefits, you might pass negative Maladjustments down to the next generation, which helps characterize both generations of scientists while also providing a mechanical decision to make. On a grander scale, maybe someone in town will be asking the players for donations, and if they don’t receive enough, the next generation will arrive finding a very different landscape than that of their forebears. Maybe you can tell that one of those decisions will benefit you while hurting your opponent, so you may try to influence the outcome to favor yourself, despite the damage it may do to the town. The integration of theme and mechanics is everywhere here, and it makes for a wonderful gaming experience.
I have to talk about one of the biggest sticking points for a lot of people, myself included: the app. This can be a divisive inclusion for a lot of people. On the one hand, it's nice to have the app manage the complexities of the branching storylines and hidden information. The music and presentation within the app can make the game feel even more premium than it already does! On the other hand, you've purchased a very expensive board game that now requires a smart device (or, after the web version releases, any computer with an Internet connection) to play it at all. Why did you buy a board game to play 'unplugged' if it still requires a device? It’s a fair thing to consider when making the decision to buy a game. All I can say is that it is used well, and I always get a giddy feeling when it tells me to pick up the tablet and read some secret information to myself.
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