Last modified April 11, 2025 by jarjar
FIRST IMPRESSION
The publisher Sorry We Are French presents us with a second game in a series that began with In Darwin's Footsteps, this time with another important figure in our history, one of the greatest French female scientists: Marie Curie.
Dance this game, we embody young scientists working alongside Marie Curie and helping her in her research. Together, we will discover radium, carry out experiments, improve our laboratory, write theses and obtain Nobel prizes!
This is a slightly advanced family board game, the theme of which may be a bit complex for younger players, but it's still well integrated. The really fun aspect of this game is the little cube tower that allows us to harvest (or not) the game's precious resources. As with any cube tower game, the tower is sometimes more generous to one player than to another, but I like how this game offers a secondary option in the form of thesis tiles. If the available cubes aren't satisfactory, the player has an alternative choice, which mitigates the luck factor somewhat. The tower is meant to mimic the constant material shortages the Curies faced during their research.

Resources (materials) also need to be manipulated, with players having to move from more common materials to less common ones, as if trying to isolate rare chemical agents.
The timing of his actions is quite important, because the time track gives valuable bonuses based on what we have, so we have to plan well and look a few turns ahead, just to get every little point possible, because yes, every little point is very precious. Don't expect to make tons of them. For our first game, our final score was very tight: 8-7-7-7! The game offers a very nice visual, and it comes with a really good little booklet on the history of Marie Curie and radium! I love it when publishers and authors take the time to give us more than a game, it's an important added value that helps to understand how the game was thought out and developed, bravo for this effort!

GAME FACTS
>> The cube tower was a challenge for the author to get a good retention percentage.
>> A superb little comic strip, which is said to have greatly inspired the author of the game, is available online to learn more about the Marie Curie method. here

TECHNICAL SHEET
Number of games played: 2
Best Setup: 2-4 players
Level: family
My best score: 13 (two players)
Cost: CAD 42 (Nov 2024)
MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS
I loved :
>> This small cube tower coupled with the theses which allows to attenuate the effect of luck.
>> Very nice material (one of the reasons for my purchase).
>> A theme that is quite well felt.
>> A fairly simple game but which still requires a little thought/planning, ideal for introducing new players to resource management.
>> The supplementary booklet which traces the life of Marie Curie.
I liked less:
>> The small number of theses tiles and limited objectives (from future expansions we can deduce this).
>> extreme calibration, seems too balanced? (to be seen with more games).

A very well illustrated family game, fun with this cube tower and educational with this extra notebook.
FUN FACTOR 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂