The Manhattan Project - Tips & Strategies

If you cannot purchase useful buildings because your opponents have already bought them or there are none available, then buy as much espionage as you can. This increases the number of spies that you can deploy on your rivals’ buildings.

Having poor buildings also means that you are unlikely to be a target for your rivals’ bombers.

While this game can be fun just placing workers and racing to get the points, the game really shines when you are using Espionage and bombers to limit your opponent’s options.

Placing a contract worker on your opponents building through the use of Espionage can really lock down that building (as the grey worker will remain in place until you opponent retrieves workers.

Also, using bombers to dame age building will not only lock down the building, but force you opponent to spent money and actions to get it repaired.

This also, makes it vital to keep fighters on hand. This will defend your building and take out your opponent’s fighters so you can send in your bombers.

In The Manhattan Project you need to get an ENGINE running as soon as possible. To do this you need to increase your options by adding buildings to your player board not wasting turns placing just one worker on the main board and nothing else.

Buying several buildings right away is most important. You should get to 4 buildings as fast as possible. Gaining additional workers are a close second (Engineers or Scientist I would defiantly never take the 3 laborers as all that does is extend your slow turns unless you grabbed a lot of one laborer buildings.)

Since the first six buildings are fixed below is my personal ranking for the starting buildings. I would say that the order of the factories/mines is debatable based on player group and individual play style. Of course buildings drawn to replace the starting buildings will change your options and effect the “best choice.”
1) Engineer University
2) Scientist University
3) Bomber Factory (the factories may switch value if you have an aggressive player group)
4) One Cube Mine
5) Fighter Factory
6) Two Cube Mine

While I enjoy this game immensely, one of the frustrating aspects is the sudden end when someone gets the bombs created for the win. With less players, the VP threshold is low enough that someone can go from 0 to won in a single turn. Regardless, the final scores usually do not reflect how well each person played through out the game, leaving an unsatisfying “winner-take-all” mentality.

Our suggestion is to continue to play the round out to completion once some one hits the win condition. Alternatively, you can give everyone one last chance to play except the player ending the game. This will give them one last hurrah to build everything they possibly can to at least “get on the scoreboard” and possibly win. If they are caught in cycle of having to recall all their workers, oh well; better luck next time.

In order to protect the person that ended the game, he should receive a bonus to help pad his final score as every other player knows what they need to beat him. Our suggestion is to give the player ending the game the highest remaining tested bomb token as bonus points. This will help edge up his score but adds another element of strategy. The sooner he can end the game, the more VP he is likely to get from it. The longer he takes, it may be negligible or even worth nothing. For other players, they may choose to test in order to deplete the stack.