There’s something inherently satisfying about watching spheres cascade down a gentle decline. Potion Explosion taps into that feeling with its five rows of marbles colliding and chaining together. Gizmos by Phil Walker-Harding seems to promise a similar experience at first glance, with its eye-catching marble dispenser, but the games themselves are very different experiences.

In Gizmos, players take on the role of inventors creating wild machines powered by energy marbles. The dispenser drops six marbles into the offer row, and on your turn, you’ll do one of four things:

• File – Reserve a gizmo for later.
• Pick – Take a single marble from the dispenser row into your supply
• Build – Spend marbles to construct a gizmo from the offer pyramid or from your archive.
• Research – Draw cards from the deck equal to your research level, and choose one to build or archive, then discard the rest.

Image Credit: Pongrácz Zsolt @PZS69 via BGG

It’s simple, but the real enjoyment comes from building a wild and exciting engine. Every gizmo you add gives you a bonus, like extra picks, or extra builds, marble storage increases, or even colour conversions. The best turns have you cascading those powers into satisfying chains, where one action triggers another, then another, leading to a flurry of bonus actions.

For example, late in our game, I had a moment where I built a red gizmo. Because I built a red gizmo, I got two bonus marble picks. Because I picked a red marble, I got to blindly draw two extra marbles from the dispenser. And because I did all that, I scored two bonus victory points. Those moments feel incredible.

Image Credit: Marco Scomparin @molecola via BGG

That one turn was great, but building up to that point is slow and painful. The game starts with every player having the same basic gizmo, offering a single blind draw from the dispenser when you archive a gizmo, which is about as exciting as a cold bowl of oatmeal. Gizmos absolutely shines when the engine building comes alive and starts firing on all cylinders, but it takes a while for things to get rolling.

And sometimes, they don’t roll at all. The dispenser can stagnate if it’s full of colours no one needs. There’s no built-in way to reset it, so if five black and one blue marbles are clogging the offer, and no one has black synergies, tough luck. Likewise, the game can be punishing if you don’t plan ahead. One player in our game archived a gizmo requiring six marbles, while his storage limit was only five. Without a way to discard that gizmo, he was kind of stuck for the rest of the game, desperately researching for an upgrade he could afford. It was brutal watching his game grind to a halt while the rest of us flourished.

Image Credit: Pongrácz Zsolt @PZS69 via BGG

The marbles, the dispenser, the satisfying domino effect of well-chained turns, it all works so wonderfully well for this light engine building game. But on the other hand, it also feels like it could have been pushed further. More variety in gizmos, variable player powers, a way to refresh the dispenser, any of these tweaks could have taken it to the next level. Gizmos was released in 2018, I feel like any hope for an expansion to add more to the game has long since perished.

That said, not every game needs to be a complex affair. Gizmos is a great family-weight game, but one I’d hesitate to bring out with younger kids due to its slow start and somewhat punishing nature when a player doesn’t plan appropriately. As for my core gaming group, it lacks the depth to be a go to engine-builder. Ultimately, Gizmos sits in that weird middle space, too light for one group, too slow for another.

But when the engine finally clicks? Yeah, that’s a great game.