Blueprint Tycoon is a simulation game, a bit of a factory management mixed with light sim city touches that focuses on you constructing buildings in order to produce resources, move them around, build things with them, sell these things and/or build more complex things while managing the needs of your worker, pollution and supply routes. I enjoyed it quite a bit, although even after hours of play, some core concepts were still opaque to me and I never got into the eponymous "Blueprint" part of the title.
The game works in scenarios, like in Sim CIty, and there's a sandbox mode for you to play like you want. I only did the scenarios (and I couldn't beat the Best Employer one) and they get you right into the game with tutorials that lay down the basics of the game. Even by following them all, when I got to the more open levels, I was a bit confused and wasn't sure about a few things. Like how to build hot-air balloons. The game goes extremely quickly over the 'blueprint' portion too. Basically, you can edit the way buildings work which is supposed to help improve production, in practice I never had to contemplate doing it, I never figured out what I could really do using different blueprints, and never used them. A bit of a bummer, since the game is kinda named after that mechanic.
Buildings you create produce resources at a variable rate depending on where you put them - some islands don't have coal, while others can't grow wheat - and then you move these resources to storage or to transformation buildings. These goods can also be sold, and you need money to run your buildings and keep your workers. I really enjoy how you'll never run out of resources - coal won't disappear, chicken-producing buildings won't run out of poultry, etc. So this makes Blueprint Tycoon more of a balance puzzle game than a simulation, which I enjoyed. That being said, this balance act means that you can't have excesses either, no gold reserve to help you in the future and your good capacity is limited by the size of your warehouses. This means that if you create inefficient roads or hire more employees that you can satisfy, you'll get in trouble, and that's what happened to me constantly on that Best Employer scenario, I could get to the end, but then my people would run out of nuggets, burgers and paper.
This game has a ton of depth, you can upgrade almost everything, create route between buildings to move resources around, research new technologies and build ports to carry goods between islands. It's a lot to take on, and it's difficult to optimize. I've had the toughest time making good chains of production and my goods were either under or over utilized and this had repercussions down the assembly chain. Not being able to turn chickens into meat quick enough meant that my burgers weren't done fast enough for my engineers to consume them. You can always throw more manpower at problems, but you always have to make more stuff for these employees and some upgrades cost special coins that you only get after set time intervals, so they must be spent wisely.
I enjoyed my time with Blueprint Tycoon! It's not a perfect game, it's a bit rough around the edges - don't try alt+tabbing while playing it, it'll mess up the camera - and some of the UI is pretty tough to get around, but it's complex, deep and it can be quite relaxing to design your perfect systems. Just keep to heart that when things start going wrong, you'll probably have to restart the whole thing. That's what I did twice on that mission I stopped on, and I felt like I didn't want to try it a third time.
