Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
To warm up for a few plays of the recent expansion Nucleum: Australia (2024, Board&Dice), I got the base game to the table to ensure I remembered all the edge case rules around tile placement, network restrictions, end-game scoring, and how to power buildings. I asked two of the guys from my strategy group to join me, and we all committed to watching a teach video to ensure we had all the rules down.
“Nucleum is hard, man,” one player said during the second turn (!!) of our first re-entry play, a reminder of the dozens of times we said that when playing the base game in 2023.
He was right. He is still right. Nucleum IS hard. Of course, that’s the deal when you try to play a lot of hard, heavy strategy games—it’s hard to remember all the rules, it’s hard to build a winning strategy, and it’s really hard to get games like Nucleum to the table. (Oh, to dream of having a neighbor who lives across the street, always looking for a friend or two to play the copy of Voidfall they have already set up in their professional gaming space. If you know anyone like that in Chicago, please call me!)
Nucleum is a tough cookie, but the arc is so satisfying that I’m always itching to play—ideally with people who already know the rules, so that I can avoid the re-teach with so many tricky rules. With the new expansion, I found a way to get Nucleum in front of one of my groups a couple more times. And, this expansion does the one thing I wanted out of a Nucleum add-on: just give me a new series of routes to stress about, with a very low amount of new rules on top of everything else.
Nucleum: Australia mostly succeeds. The only question I’m still struggling with: did it really need the boats?
Ahoy, Mate
Nucleum: Australia is a 1-4 player heavy Euro-style strategy game that revolves around an action tile system. Tiles can be played as a double action tile to one’s player board, or placed with a worker as a piece of track on the map, extending the network of that player and possibly others to build routes connecting various cities to Nucleum facilities, used to power buildings using turbines and uranium.
For a deeper dive of the base game’s rules, feel free to browse my review of the original design. Here, I’ll share some thoughts on the new goodies, and whether the new package is worth a look. (Nucleum: Australia comes with a small handful of new contracts, which are all useful for elements of the new game. However, these contracts are not the reason to buy this expansion…the new contracts fall into the category of “slightly more stuff to help shake up the base game.”)
The New Map
The wildest thing about the map featured in Nucleum: Australia is quite simple: it’s a lot harder to power buildings at the start of the game. That’s because there is no longer a standing coal facility in the northern center of the map like the base game. That would be OK if there was easy access to coal from the distant coal market, but that coal market is very limited in Nucleum: Australia. Players now have to use the new tools at their disposal to power buildings (coal mines and boats, which we’ll get to next).
There’s a Nucleum power facility in the southeastern portion of the map, but no coal or even uranium mine spaces anywhere nearby. For the first 25% or so of each of my plays, players struggled to use the Energize action to get any buildings flipped over and energized. There are fewer uranium mine spaces on the new map (at least, it feels that way), and because one still needs to power a building by connecting to a Nucleum facility to Energize, there are some areas that are absolutely not ideal for starting a player’s network.
I like that Nucleum: Australia doubles down on the difficulty. It’s as if designers Simone Luciani and David Turczi wanted to announce to the gaming world “ahh, you thought Nucleum was too easy? Take THIS!!” and we got the map for Nucleum: Australia. I wouldn’t call the new map punishing, necessarily, but you can no longer just drop into any location and work out a way to get coal and/or uranium to your building.
After the release of the base game, I felt strongly that Board&Dice would do just fine by releasing a new Nucleum map every year or two. The base system is solid. I don’t even really need new actions or powers or rules to enjoy it. Just “Age of Steam” this thing (yes, that’s a verb) and give me a drip of new expansion maps from time to time to keep things fresh. The Australia map sets out on a mission to give us something different, and mostly succeeds.
Boats
I thought the signature addition to the Nucleum system would be the new shipping lines when I read the rules to the expansion. In practice, boats have been less exciting than they appeared on paper.
There are four spaces on the new map connected by shipping lanes, and players have a new action tile that combos with any other tile used on a “regular” turn (a turn where a player takes the actions on a tile then places that tile above their player board). This new action tile is simply to place a boat anywhere they don’t already have a boat, by paying a small amount of thalers to establish a new shipping lane. Like adding track, shipping lanes automatically extend a player’s network.
But unlike track, a player can only transport electricity over their own network using their boats. This led to a number of interesting problems during my games—I need to get my uranium across the ocean to the Nucleum facility in Hobart, but I don’t have a shipping lane established yet, so I can’t tap that resource. Time for plan B! But in my experience, boats mostly slowed the game down, particularly because most players could only take the Place a Boat action with their new action tile. (There are five new standard action tiles in this expansion that are shuffled into the mix of other tiles, available for purchase during the Develop action. But only four of those new tiles have the Place a Boat action and those might not come out for a while.)
In the early game of my plays of Nucleum: Australia, the players that could connect their eastern-most shipping lanes to Hobart (the city that begins the game with a Nucleum facility, in the southeastern corner of the map) were the ones who usually got rolling with the Energize action first. That led to a bit of a scripted opening with this map. It’s relatively easy to build boats, so there’s no tension with that scoring milestone if it is shuffled into play during setup. And the boats don’t do anything particularly special—they don’t have, say, uranium loaded onboard, laser guns that can shoot down opposing player boats, powers that might boost one’s ability to power buildings, etc.
Boats do not block other players from doing anything, and they certainly look nice on the board. But as a gameplay addition, shipping lanes were a miss.
Coal Mines
The shipping lanes were a collective frown. But the new coal mines turned that frown upside down real quick-like.
The Australia map has as many as eight individual coal mines (depending on player count) that can be established using the Industrialize action, the same action used in the base game to build turbines and uranium mines. Here, a player can place a worker into a new mine and leave that worker in place for the rest of the game, granting the mine’s owner one free coal during ea;ch Energize action. As a bonus, players can earn a small amount of coal, points, or reputation if they build enough new mines by adding tokens to a small, personal coal mine bonus area.
The new coal mines ended up being strategically huge, in part because coal is so much harder to acquire on the Australia map. But it’s also just kind of cool to have 2-3 of your own personal coal mines. Everyone is racing for them. Some of the new contracts require mines in different city locations, so that offers another race that players will try to win to grab new technologies on their personal tech board. Because many of the uranium locations are so much farther away from Hobart, coal mining ends up being The Hunt for Red October—it’s so hard to find the elusive sauce to energize buildings.
Everyone who joined me for review plays commented about their love for the coal mines here, and this is another way that Nucleum: Australia is basically the base game with a few extra rules—there are a couple of new rules because the map required subtle changes, but this helps differentiate this expansion from the base game in a subtle way to provide a meaningful upgrade to the challenge level. In the case of the coal mines, I approve!
“Yeah, I Needed to Shake Up the Base Game”
I don’t personally know a lot of people who have played Nucleum as many times as I have (seven times, including the base game and this expansion), so I don’t know how many folks really needed to shake up the meta. But for those that do, the best thing about Nucleum: Australia is that it’s definitely not “more is more.”
The expansion makes the game harder, full stop. It does make the game longer, which we found drove scores higher than with the base game, with winners consistently in the 220-250-point range. In one of my plays, a player reached the last step of all three income tracks, something I never saw in the base game.
Nucleum: Australia doesn’t “fix” anything from the base game. Nucleum (both the base game and the expansion) is still best as a three-player game, with four-player games topping three hours. End-game scoring is still messy. This expansion doesn’t offer new technology boards. It’s a bit too easy to forget all the ongoing powers players have unlocked with their techs during the game. (“Ahh, right, I unlocked tech A2 and get a coin every time I energize a building…can I retcon that and take three coins for all the ones I forgot?”)
But Nucleum: Australia gave me a chance to get the base game back to the table, and for that, I am thankful that this new expansion exists. It does plenty of nice things with the new map and offers a nice alternative when I want to play Nucleum with experienced players. The solo is still a beast, and the changes introduced with Nucleum: Australia are extremely minor in terms of rules overhead.
If you are a fellow Nucleum junkie, give Nucleum: Australia a look!
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