Utopia Engine

Utopia Engine is a big, solitaire print-and-play game available at PnPArcade

It is an impressive creation, with all the care that obviously went into it, and it has a big story about an artificer trying to rebuild a fabled machine to prevent Doomsday.  We were in the middle of the pandemic and I heard about it from one of many Youtubers who were talking about solo games -- that's how I discovered PnPArcade and Utopia Engine.  I played the two-page black and white version, though there is also a compact one-page version and a gorgeous full color PDF as well.  Check out its BoardGameGeek page for a look at these other layouts.

At first, it was fun rolling the dice and following along in the rules to figure out which boxes to put the scores in, and how they add up to success or failure of each task.  By the end of the first page, I was finding some possible grey areas, just not sure if a certain combo could be scored or not, and I more or less just drifted off to other projects.  I did manage to build a few constructs, tick off some skulls, survive a fight or two, and get really confused by the time track.  And I rediscovered that if I'm solo gaming, I'm very likely to fudge some rolls just to keep a game alive, which was not optimal here.

I found the lore and atmosphere of Utopia Engine very enjoyable, but there were just a few too many variables and rules changing from section to section.  I should go back and try to wrap it up some day.  Future post detected...