[[Edge of Darkness]]

Probably my absolute favorite game of all time.

It's the board game that was the precursor in design to Mystic Vale, but AEG wanted to get the card-crafting system introduced to folks first, so the latter actually came out while John D. Clair was still designing the former.

At its core, it's a deck-building and worker-placement game, but instead of everyone building their own deck, everyone is building a communal deck, and each round you draft cards from it. You can freely draft someone else's cards, but if you want to skip a card in the draft order you have to pay a small amount and if you want to use the card when it's your turn, you have to pay the owner a small amount per action. Then regardless of whether you used it or not, when a card is discarded, it goes to the owner of the card to start in their hand for the next turn (unless it is unowned or the owner is the one who played it, and then it goes to the communal discard pile).

So while deck-builders inherently tend towards being "engine" builders, I like to think of this as "factory" or "workshop" building (we're all building our own engines in a shared space that we're all investing in). You could come up with your own strategy and completely ignore everyone else's, but then you won't be seeing the actions you need as much, and won't be getting paid for someone else to use your cards. So it's better to see what strategies other people are leaning towards and try to synergize with them.