My favourite pieces of classical music tend to either start or end strongly. With that in mind, this preview of Paverson Games latest title – Luthier – will start like Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, starting with a headline. Luthier is a great game. A pipe organ cuts the silence. The blind bidding clack-clack-clack of the worker disc placement adds a rich, bright counterpoint to the by-the-books Euro format of collecting resources to fulfil goals. A toccata to its fugue, if you will. The result is a clean, competitive, engaging game. Heavier than medium-weight, without being too difficult to teach or pick up, but with a richness that rewards repeated play. Again, much like Bach’s piece. We all know how it starts, and the more you listen to it, the more you appreciate what comes after that familiar early exposition.

Booze and music – a festival?

I previewed Dave Beck’s previous game, Distilled, a long while ago. I really like that game, so I was excited to see an earlier prototype of Luthier back at the UK Games Expo in 2023 (show report here). It was little more than black squares on white paper at that time, but the mechanisms sounded really clever, and I loved the unusual theme. The promise of Vincent Dutrait’s artwork gave me confidence, and that confidence was rewarded when I saw the near-final prototype at this year’s UK Games Expo. Luthier is beautiful. Rich colours, gorgeous illustrations, and some pretty fantastic iconography.

The game places you in the role of a famous musical instrument-making family from the past. Your goal is to gather the materials you need, before crafting the finest musical instruments you can, fit for performances at the orchestra in the middle of the board. At the same time, art is imitating life through the patrons in the game. These are rich, powerful people who, if you can keep satisfied, will reward you with gifts. If you manage to fulfil all of their demands, their card ends up tucked behind your player board with ongoing bonuses for the rest of the game.

You might think you can just choose to ignore the patrons and concentrate on something else to build points, and while you technically can, you probably don’t want to. If you let a patron’s cube move all the way to the right as the rounds progress, they get tired of you and leave your family’s business, clobbering you with a loss of VPs (prestige points in Luthier’s parlance) in the process. This happened in reality. Patrons rewarded the arts for performances and productions, they invested in the families and their crafts.

In Luthier you have a game where your main goals and main source of points come from the various places these artisans touched with their craft. Patrons have a place on the board (the salon) where you can compete to add them to your family’s board. Instrument designs come from another contestable market. Performances are fought over in the same fashion, likewise repairs. All go towards your score, and all are involved in one of the main aims of the game, to claim First Chair for each instrument in the orchestra pit.

Harmony

Luthier is a strange one in some ways. As with many other Euro games, the theme strikes me as one that could have been replaced with something different relatively easily. We could be furniture makers making beautiful pieces and selling them. We could be painters creating masterpieces and vying for space in galleries. We could even be toymakers trying to be front-and-centre in Hamley’s window in London.

That said, however, the theme is integrated so well in Luthier that I don’t want a different one. I’ll admit I found a slight disconnect with the way the instruments just end up in First Chair, as do performance tokens. The performers themselves are never referenced or attributed, which felt odd at first, but then I realised I need to take a step back and understand that the entire game is viewed through the luthier’s lens. Their role starts and ends with the creation and repair of the instruments in their workshops. The instruments are used in the performances, but who uses them isn’t the focus of the game. Our main focus is to rough-out instruments before finishing them and creating things of beauty.

It all works so well together. The resources are limited to just three different types: animal products, wood, and metals. Removing the mental overhead needed to think about lots of different types of resources and manage any potential upgrade paths for them is an overlooked piece of game design in my opinion. At any moment in the game you can look at your player board, count the cubes in three colours, and know exactly what you can and cannot afford to do. This gives you the laser focus you need to concentrate on your strategy and your path to victory.

All of this is pulled together with the worker disc placement, which is my favourite part of the game. In turn order, each player places a disc at a time at the various spots on the board. Some of them are on your player boards, whereas the rest are shared spaces on the main board. All players can go to each space as many times as they like, but the interesting part is that each worker is a disc with a value printed on it, and they’re placed face-down in a stack. Each stack is resolved to determine turn order, with the highest value getting first pick of the cards at each respective market. In the event of a tie, which is common as all players start with a 1, 3, and 5 value chip each, it’s first-come, first-served.

It’s great. It adds drama three or four times to every round of the game in a way which is usually reserved for lighter, party-style games.

Final thoughts

If you haven’t guessed by now, I like Luthier a lot. It’s a looker for sure, and even with the early prototype, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was an Eagle-Gryphon game. It all feels premium. Vincent and Guillaume’s artwork is beautiful on the cards and the boards, and there’s nothing that feels out of place or confusing. It’s a game of threes, which pulls it all together nicely too. Three different resources, three types of instruments, and three types of performance. Maybe the future holds an expansion which adds to these, I don’t know, but as the game comes it feels like does enough without muddying the waters.

The hidden bidding worker placement doesn’t feel that important in your first game, which makes it easy to overlook its importance and its impact on the game. Once you make the connections though, it all hits you. The points from the public goals, each of which has different levels of completion (a bit like Ark Nova, a review of which you can read here), are dependent on completing certain types of patrons, or having instruments in different areas of the pit, or different numbers of rare instruments crafted, etc. When the cards you need to complete these goals appear in the market, the competition can be furious. Do you make a big statement and place your 5-chip in the Salon straight away to claim that patron? Or do you just slip your 1-chip there creating a false sense of competition, hoping the other players wage war for those cards while you quietly craft two instruments instead? How well do you think you can read the poker faces of your friends and family?

There’s more that I don’t have the time or space to tell you about in detail, for the sake of not turning this into a wall of text. The three tracks to move along for asymmetric boosts. The starting abilities and resources of each family being different. The dance you play in trying to keep your patrons satisfied while still competing on the main board, not only to keep them, but to keep their gifts coming. The only negative I really found during my time with the game was the ‘standard’ two-player game. It blocks some spots in the pit off and reduces the number of cards in the market to keep things competitive, but the drama and tension of the worker bidding doesn’t feel as juicy. The reason I put standard in quotes though is because you can add in the solo bot as a third player, which I recommend doing. There’s more to do in order to run the bot, but the competition is better. I much prefer playing at three and four players though. I love the metagame that takes place above the table between you and your friends.

There are still tweaks to come to the game between now and its release, but even in the state it’s in now, Luthier is a brilliant game. Music to my ears, like clapping along to the Radetzky March at the end of the New Year’s Day content from Vienna. Bravo!

Luthier launches on Kickstarter on July 16th 2024. You can sign up for updates or to back it here – Luthier Kickstarter page.

Luthier (2025)

Design: Dave Beck, Abe Burson
Publisher: Paverson Games
Art: Vincent Dutrait
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-120 mins

The post Luthier Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Gutenberg takes its name from Johannes Gutenberg, the German printer and inventor who gave his name to the movable-type printing press, which brought about the printing revolution in Europe. Its invention is considered one of the pivotal moments of the second millennium, so he’s kind of a big deal. Especially because developing printing workshops in 15th Century Germany is the perfect setting for a board game.

The gears of industry

The first thing you’ll notice when you see Gutenberg on the table are the cardboard gears. I dare you to not play with the cogs, making them spin, as if you were two-years-old playing with a Fisher Price toy. It’s a toy factor which really helps sell the game to players. Euros can be here-comes-a-hosepipe-ban dry, so anything which makes the game a bit more ‘fun’ is great. It’s especially good when the game in question is pretty much bang in the middle of medium-weight complexity.

Each player takes the role of one of the early printing pioneers, and the aim of the game is to complete printing orders. You need to invest in type-blocks, inks, patrons, and your levels in various specialties, in order to be the best. The gears I mentioned above are more than just decorative – they give you once-per-round abilities too. Choosing which to take, and lining them up well is important, because the first thing you do each round is to rotate the top one to the next section, causing that oh-so-satisfying chain reaction.

If this is all sounding like any other Euro at the moment, I can understand why. Other than the turning gears, there’s not much new acting as grease between them, making Gutenberg stand out from the crowd. And that’s where we take a look at the little player screens and the multitude of small black cubes in the box.

Bookmakers or book-makers?

There are five different actions you can take in each round of Gutenberg, but the resources on offer vary in usefulness. Instead of just taking turns in order everything is up for grabs, it just depends how much you want it.

At the start of a round, each player has a number of black cubes to insert into a series of tracks on a little board behind their screens. When the screens are whipped away, the player with the most cubes in each track gets first pick for that action. Where it gets really clever is how ties are broken. The First Player in each round has fewer cubes to spend than the next person, who has fewer than the next, and so on. Predicting what the other players are going bid for is the key to doing well, and it’s really tricky.

I love how thematic the pieces of the game feel. The wooden type-blocks are absolutely gorgeous, so tactile, and the little cardboard component boxes look just like an old-fashioned type case. When you take all of that into consideration, and those fun gears, it makes me wonder why the ink tokens are these tiny, fiddly, little cardboard tokens. I’ve got big hands, and they’re no fun to handle. It’s crying out for a blinged-up set of plastic ink drops.

Sans serif

Gutenberg gets a lot right when it comes to game design. It’s very easy to teach, and to learn, and the design decisions are a big part of that. For example, the actions are represented with horizontal rows of things on the board, and the rows are duplicated on the little boards you use to bid for turn order. There’s no trying to remember where you can do what, or in what order. You just work from top to bottom. It’s very elegant.

The double-sided board and the way the actions work mean that the game is identical whether you’re playing with two, three, or four players. I like it best at four, however, because the drama of the secret bidding is multiplied. You also get to see more of the different gears and patronage cards. The solo game works nicely enough, but so much of the fun is derived from what happens behind the screens, that a bit of the soul of Gutenberg is sapped when played solitaire.

Unless you’re playing with newcomers to board games, I’d recommend ignoring the rulebook, and using the character tiles in your first game, and every game in fact. It adds a little asymmetry which makes things a bit more interesting. With newbies though, it’s enough to play without. I like that there’s plenty of emergent strategy too. As you get more familiar with the game, you’ll find yourself playing quite differently to your first few games.

Final thoughts

Gutenberg then. It’s a cracking medium-weight game, and it’s a lot of fun. It’s quick to teach, it’s easy to learn, and it’s got a great table presence. If it gets the exposure it deserves, I can see it being one of those games that gets recommended to everyone new to the hobby, in the same way games like Azul, Pandemic, and Quacks are. Love or hate the expression, it makes a fantastic gateway game.

If you like your strategy games heavy, Gutenberg might not keep your attention for a lot of repeated play, There aren’t enough gears to mesh in your plans, despite the inclusion of actual gears in the game. But if you want a game that will get pulled out again and again at games nights, conventions, and family gatherings, Gutenberg is a fantastic choice.

With any luck, Portal’s decision to publish it means that it’ll get far more exposure than it ever would have with just Granna behind it. Portal had a stand at the recent UK Games Expo (show report here) with a huge stack of Gutenberg boxes. By the end of the first day, it was already down to very limited stock – this is one to keep an eye on.

(fun fact: the editor I’m writing this review in is named Gutenberg too!)

Review copy kindly provided by Portal Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Gutenberg is available from our sponsor – Kienda. Sign-up using this link to get 5% off your first order over £60.

Gutenberg (2021)

Designers: Katarzyna Cioch, Wojciech Wiśniewski
Publishers: Granna, Portal Games
Art: Rafał Szłapa
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Gutenberg Review appeared first on Punchboard.