Engine Building

Engine Building names a pattern, not a genre: a game rewards moves that don't score directly but instead increase the rate at which future moves will score. A tableau-builder like Race for the Galaxy or Terraforming Mars is built almost entirely around this — a card that produces two resources a turn is worth more than a card worth four points once, if there's enough game left to let the difference compound. Factorio is the pattern taken to a digital, real-time extreme: nearly the entire game is spent building machines whose sole output is feeding other machines, with the shippable product arriving almost as an afterthought.

Because it's a pattern rather than a genre, engine building shows up inside Deckbuilders (a card that draws extra cards), inside Worker Placement games (a worker that generates resources other workers then spend), and inside City Builders (a factory zone that feeds a power plant that unlocks more factory zones) without any of those being about engine building the way Wingspan or Dominion's buy-engine builds are.

The pattern carries a specific risk: a snowball. Once an engine is running well ahead of an opponent's, the gap tends to widen rather than close, because the whole point of an engine is that it compounds. Well-designed engine-building games counter this with catch-up mechanics (rubber-banding scoring, diminishing returns on stacked bonuses) or simply accept the snowball as the genre's honest reward for reading the tableau correctly early — a design choice that separates games explicitly about building toward a strong turn from games that want every turn to matter equally.