For us at Board’s Eye View, Mechanical Beast is at its best as a solo game. It works, of course, as a fully cooperative game but it can be frustrating when another player takes an action (particularly a gear action) that others consider suboptimal. This can make the game overly susceptible to ‘alpha player’ syndrome, where one bossy player ends up trying to dictate everyone else’s actions. If you find that’s a problem, then the rules offer the option of playing a semi-cooperative mode, where you still have to meet the collective victory conditions but the win goes to the player that rescues the most people meeples. Alternatively, Mechanical Beast can be played as a competitive game: there is no android but each player has two engineers and they are in a race to get both to an exit after the Control Room has been found. This involves very different dynamics to the solo and cooperative modes, adding to the play value of this clever box of tricks. – Board’s Eye View (Link)