Published by Friendly Bee Game Company, the design by Joseph Bugbee and Alex Cheng for the basic game of Widgets n' Digit$ is for an easy-going easy-to-play economic game where 2-4 players are competing to make the most money (cash in hand and value of upgrade cards) over the four quarters of a fiscal year.
There's an initial party game element to set the light-hearted tone and determine first player, tho' there's no intrinsic first-player advantage. In this prelude to the game, players have to come up with their product idea (ie: the 'widget' they are manufacturing), their company name and an advertising slogan. The rules offer several options for choosing between players' submissions but most folk are likely to go for the product and slogan that gets the most laughs. This is the one aspect of an otherwise innocuous game that could get rather bawdy (NSFW - Not Safe For Work) with some players!
Gameplay itself is simple and straightforward. Players each have their own individual player boards that represent their factory. This basic factory can take one raw material, convert it into a part, convert a part into a finished good and sell a finished good at retail for $20. The raw materials can be taken for free, so your factory will automatically generate income of $20 in each of the game's four turns even if you do nothing at all, tho' you'll have to pay $4 per turn for your factory's basic labour costs.
Prior to production tho' you can spend money to buy upgrade cards, each of which will overlay a section of your factory on your player board so that that stage of production can process more than just one item. You can also buy resources from a central market board. If, for example, you've upgraded the part of your factory that turns parts into finished goods but you still only produce one part per turn, then you'll want to buy additional parts from the market so that you can turn them into finished goods. Obviously if your factory's retail outlet has been upgraded so it has the capacity to sell more than one widget for $20, you'll reap that reward but if not you can still sell surplus items (finished product, parts and even raw materials) at the marginal prices showing on the central market board. In the basic game, the only downside of buying upgrade cards is the additional labour cost that becomes due at the end of the round.
Aside from the ability to pay to refresh the display of available upgrade cards, that's all there is to the basic game. Players are all pretty much guaranteed to end up with more money than they started with - which makes this a satisfying play with older children and adults new to modern board games. It's quite 'mathsy', as players need to work out how much income they will generate and how much they can afford to spend without leaving themselves unable to pay labour costs at the ends of the round: a plus when playing with children as Widgets n' Digit$ therefore has an educational element. There's barely any player interaction, however, in the basic game. When you buy or sell items in the central market it does alter the marginal prices for the next player but it is rare for that to make a major difference to other players' fortunes: players are mostly all focused on their own factory boards and one player's actions don't have much influence on those of other players.
Widgets n' Digit$ is more tho' than just this basic game. It incorporates two expansions that significantly change the game. The components for the 'Worker Wars' expansion is just a batch of cubes. The cubes represent workers. You each get enough to run a non-upgraded factory but there will also be a pool available of additional workers (two in the pool for each player). Each round there's an auction for additional workers and it's a highly competitive market. Suddenly a game which had very little player interaction becomes a cutthroat struggle where players can spend big not merely to cover their own production needs but also to prevent opponents' factories from functioning, particularly where a player has bought an upgrade card early on that demands four or five workers. In our plays of the prototype at Board's Eye View we found the competition for workers was sometimes so fierce, and the consequences so dire for players losing out on the auction, that we felt the need to house rule a more lenient variant that allowed factories to function at their most basic level when their upgrade cards' extra worker requirements weren't met.
The other expansion included in the game is a deck of 'Boardroom Battle' cards. These replace the basic upgrade cards. They work in the same way as the basic upgrade cards except that half the cards have an additional effect that either directly benefits the card's owner or penalises one or more of the other players. Again, this expansion adds more player interaction. In our plays at Board's Eye View we found it transformed Widgets n' Digit$ into a creatively chaotic 'take that' game. If your games play out like ours, you'll find players much more likely to pay out to refresh the card display in search of a card with a bonus power; and note that some of the bonus actions specifically invite a player to 'scan' and reorder cards in the upgrade deck and mine the discard pile...
With expansions that change up the game to such a degree, Widgets n' Digit$ feels like two or three games in one. You can play the core game as a light educational family game and you can incorporate one or both expansions to turn it into an aggressively 'take that' if still tongue-in-cheek contest. However you play, Widgets n' Digit$ plays quickly: as it's played over just four rounds (the four quarters of the fiscal year), you'll find games rarely run much beyond 30 minutes, even with four players.
Shown here on Board's Eye View is a preview prototype of Widgets n' Digit$. Friendly Bee Game Company are bringing the game to Kickstarter on 16 February. Click here to check out the campaign as soon as it goes live.