Shush now students, pay attention

Sankoré is set in West Africa in the 14th Century, and is based on its namesake university in Timbuktu. You’ve been tasked with spreading knowledge by the emperor, Mansa Musa, and during the game you’ll be teaching students, adding courses to your curriculum, and adding books to the shelves of the great library. All of this takes place on the four areas of the main board, each of which is related to the four main subject areas in the game: Astronomy, Mathematics, Theology, and Law.

Explaining how the game is played in detail is too much for a review. Sankoré is a heavy game that requires the same kind of planning and strategy that you’d normally find in a Vital Lacerda game like On Mars (review here). At the very highest level, there’s a dependency loop which you need to keep an eye on to make sure you have enough of the game’s three principal resources: salt, gold, and books. Actions on the theology area of the board will gain you books. Books can be spent in the mathematics area to gain gold. That gold is used in astronomy actions, which result in getting salt, which in turn can be spent to do the theology actions. Thus, the circle of life is complete.

The game design around the four different areas on the board is especially good. Each area has very different actions, with different costs and different dependencies, but there are some core concepts that permeate every teaching action. Prime among the concepts is the idea of knowledge, which makes a lot of sense in a game about learning and teaching, right? Each area has its own shared level of knowledge, which increases as pupils are recruited to players’ boards. As you put more buildings on the board your personal knowledge increases, and adding that to the shared knowledge dictates which level of each action you can take. It’s a cool concept which means that actions slowly build in power as the game progresses. If you choose to min-max in one area, you can dominate the most expensive spaces there.

The other important aspect of the design is the way the different areas are divided and contested. Each area is split into four sub-areas A-D, and each area has two separate mid-game assessment points which award books and prestige to the players building in each sub-area, based on the level of competition there. It’s a simple concept, but it needed to be because there is so much going on that you need to try to stay focused on. By keeping one system of scoring area control, an unnecessary layer of overhead has been avoided by not using unwarranted asymmetry.

Bookkeeping

Books are the most important thing in Sankoré. They’re also one of the most confusing things. As the game goes on you’ll gain books which go on your player board into their allocated spaces, while other actions make you ‘pay’ these books onto the shared library board. Putting walls around the Sankoré Madrasa with the mathematics action, for instance, or graduating students. There are three shelves to choose from when you add your book, and this simple act – putting a book on a shelf – leads on to the most complicated concept in the game.

Scoring.

You might notice that there’s no VP track on the game board, which is unusual nowadays. This is because no scoring is done until the end of the game. It didn’t even register with me until halfway through my first play, and my immediate thought was to one of the guys in my games group. He hates it when a game doesn’t have any visible way to keep track of scoring until the end of the game. While the rest of the world loves Great Western Trail, he won’t play it again for that very reason. If that’s a deal breaker for you, you might want to consider it before spending your cash.

Scoring is based on the amount of prestige you collect during the game. It’s everywhere, from little wooden stars you collect, to stars on graduate student tiles, and stars on your player boards when you build enough in one area. The value of each prestige isn’t fixed though, it’s based on the books in the library. Each shelf is appraised separately, with two points being awarded to the colour of the most numerous books, and one point for the colour in second place. If there’s a tie at the end of the game, it’s the colour which managed to get all its books in first that wins.

This all goes to add a really interesting dynamic which some people aren’t going to have a good time with. Not on their first play, anyway. I remember my first game, thinking “I’ve got loads of orange prestige, this is great”, before the hideous realisation that there were almost no orange books in the library, meaning they were worth nothing. That’s hard to stomach if you’re used to games that throw points at you as if they’re dollar bills and you’re the only stripper working the 11 am shift. It adds in this ever-changing, plasma-like layer to an otherwise rigid Euro experience. Your strategy can and will adapt as the game goes on, and a well-placed book in the final turn can mean the difference between winning and losing.

Maybe that’s not your thing, but I love it, like the parallel universe morning shift stripper I could be. My biggest gripe is that there’s nothing included in the box to help you with the final scoring. No track to tally your points, no little notepad to write your totals. In a game which makes you hang on until the very end to find out who won, it’s a janky experience to have to go and find some paper and a pen.

Final thoughts

Sankoré then. A game that honestly, not everyone is going to enjoy. The scoring is unusual. There are a ton of interconnected dependencies. It takes a while to set up. If you prefer your games on the heavier end of the spectrum though, this is a real treat. Ian O’Toole’s artwork and graphic design lift the whole thing and make it feel much friendlier and approachable than it might have been. The guy’s a wizard if you ask me. And for once, I play one of Fabio’s games which doesn’t make me feel like it ends one turn too soon. I love his games, but that feeling of “always leave them wanting” isn’t my favourite thing.

There’s so much I haven’t even touched on, from the skill tiles that boost your actions, to the spatial puzzle of which lessons go where on your board and where to place your students. I haven’t mentioned sending your camels across Africa for the Astronomy action, building outposts as you go, or the competition for position around the courtyard you build together. I haven’t talked about the objective cards to help give you some focus in the early game. As ever, my goal here is to give you a feeling of what the game is like to play, and what you’re likely to enjoy or dislike. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty, you can read the rules here.

I want to give a special mention to the solo mode. I was worried running the AI bot was going to be an exercise in flowchart hell, but it’s not. It’s easy to learn and it runs smooth as silk, which is perfect in a game which is going to drain your cognitive ability like a Hobnob soaking up a cup of tea. There are four different bots of varying difficulty to compete against too, which is great. As a solo experience, it’s a fantastic way to practise and enjoy the game on your own.

Thematically it holds its own. The idea of accepting students, putting them through classes, spreading knowledge, and trying to gather prestige in your chosen academic area, is a solid one. It’s represented well in the game. The components are great, especially the game’s insert which does the job very nicely indeed. Setting up and playing the game feels like an Eagle-Gryphon experience, but without the associated price tag, and I love it for that. It’s only January, but I can already see Sankoré being in my top 5 games of 2024.

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

Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa (2024)

Design: Fabio Lopiano, Mandela Fernandez-Grandon
Publisher: Osprey Games
Art: Ian O’Toole
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 150-180 mins

The post Sankoré Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Rather than enlisting the design services of Messrs. Turczi & Tascini, this time around the game comes from the brain of Punchboard favourite, Fabio Lopiano. His hallmark as far as I’m concerned is creating games that are tight, tricky, and always feel like they end a turn or two too soon. Both Ragusa (review here) and Merv (review here) did this, and I really enjoyed both of them.

The premise of Zapotec is pretty standard Euro fare. Players are building buildings and pyramids in ancient Central America, by gathering resources and making an engine more efficient than the rest. Play an action card from your hand, take turns in numerical order, rinse and repeat. What makes it interesting is the clever way your player boards, buildings, and cards interact.

Tic-tac-toe

The action cards you play to start each round have a clever triple use. The number on each dictates turn order, as I mentioned above, and the icon in the middle dictates whereabouts on the board you can build. That initiative system for turn order is a nice treat, usually reserved for the likes of Gloomhaven, and it introduces some fun mind games. The final use for each card comes into play on your player board, and in Zapotec, those are the bones with the most meat on them.

Yes, they’re those cheap, thin, gloss player boards which are unfortunately all too commonplace now. Nevertheless, the tiles you take from the board when you build, are slapped into spaces on a 3×3 grid on your board, à la Noughts & Crosses / Tic-tac-toe. Each row and column in the grid has one of the three resources next to it, and on the top of your chosen action card, you’ll find one of those resources.

Find a row or column that matches your resource, and activate every building along it. Boom – resources-a-go-go! If, that is, you’ve made clever choices about which tiles you build, and where. This is easily my favourite aspect of the game, it’s a proper little puzzle, and you can try out different combinations each time you play, which is something I always appreciate in a game.

Timeshare pyramids

While the majority of the game is spent with your brain squishing itself into submission, trying to work out the best efficiencies from your buildings, there is some player-to-player interaction. Pyramids are the order of the day, and on the side of your player board you’ll find some chunky pyramid pieces. They’re really nice sculpts which lock together really satisfyingly. Starting a pyramid on the main board is no guarantee that you’ll be the person to finish it, as the other players can chip in and add a layer of their own colour if you give them a chance.

While the pyramids are a nice touch, I think too much of the budget for the game went on them. The slippy player boards feel cheap, and the game’s resources are all just cardboard chits. I’d have been just as happy with cardboard layers for the pyramids if it meant a double-layer player board. Talking of building pyramids, that takes me onto one of the biggest disconnects I found with the game and the setting.

Euros aren’t exactly renowned for having a tight theme, but we accept that some themes are pasted-on. In Zapotec though, the game never tells you who you’re meant to be, as a player. I’m not sure if I represent a tribe, a noble, royalty, or whatever. I thought I’d maybe just glossed over it when I read the rules, so I went back and checked, and sure enough, it never actually tells you. Of course, it doesn’t really matter, but it makes that part of the teach where you start with “In this game we’re xxxxx and we’re trying to be the best at xxxxxx”, impossible.

Gone too soon

I have an odd relationship with Fabio Lopiano. More accurately, I have an odd relationship with his games. I really enjoy playing his designs, and I’m sure it’s intentional, but they often feel like they end prematurely. It’s like you get to that point where your engine is finely tuned and just about to reward you with untold loot, aaaand the game ends. I’m trying to think of an analogy that’s not as rude as the one which immediately comes to mind. The man’s a massive tease!

There are only five rounds in the entire game, which turns it into an efficiency race. Zapotec isn’t a game where you can really min-max, because of the nature of buildings and resources, and the way they combine. It pits everyone in a race to build pyramids, move up the sacrifice track, and complete any rituals (shared objectives) on display.

That all feels at odds with the usual Board&Dice Euro games, which offer up a veritable point salad, with lots of tracks to climb, and a feeling of not being able to do all of the things, so focus on a few. If you come into Zapotec expecting that, you might be disappointed. This is a much tighter puzzle of a game, with laser-sharp focus on direct competition for the few things on offer.

Final thoughts

I could have handled this review differently and steered away from comparisons from the rest of the Board&Dice stable. Each game deserves critique on its own merits, after all. There’s an expectation though, built on the back of the reputation of the T series (you can read reviews of Teotihuacan and Tawantinsuyu here, and here respectively), and a good review should tell you whether you can expect to enjoy a game or not.

Here’s the thing. Zapotec is a good game. It’s a really good game. I really like Fabio’s games, and Zapotec sits just under Merv and just above Ragusa for me. It’s just a slightly different direction for Board&Dice, and I like that they’re making games with different designers. Zapotec is a tight, clever puzzle, and the satisfaction you’ll get from generating loads of stuff from your carefully planned player board is fantastic. The solo mode is really good, and very easy to run.

Zapotec is a great option if you’ve found the T games too heavy, and too complicated. It’s bang in the middle of middleweight in terms of complexity, and because it only has five rounds, you’ll easily have time to setup, play, and pack away in a ninety-minute session. I don’t really like the disjointed feeling of the plastic pyramid pieces and wooden buildings and markers, and I wish the player boards didn’t feel as cheap as they do. However, for a game that costs under £30 (+ shipping) at the time of writing, Zapotec is a bargain, and a very easy recommendation for me to make.

Review copy kindly provided by Board&Dice. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

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

Zapotec (2022)

Designer: Fabio Lopiano
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Zbigniew Umgelter, Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60 mins

The post Zapotec Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Ragusa is set in the 15th Century, and pits any number from one to five players in action against one another. You’d be forgiven for looking at the box, the photographs, and even the description, and thinking it’s a city-builder game. Indeed, this is the blurb from Braincrack Games’ website:

The game tasks players with building the city, its walls, and making use of its growing economy to find their fortunes!

Make no mistake though, this is a worker-placement game. It’s just wearing a big fake glasses, nose and moustache disguise, and pretending to be a city-builder. But hey, I’m a Euro game fan through-and-through, so this is par for the course. I just want you to understand from the outset what Ragusa is, and isn’t.

Hex appeal

The game board is divided up into a series of hexes. The hexes in the middle of the board have six building spaces – one on each corner, and those around the outside of the board have three spaces. Every building spot touches three hexes, and a player’s turn is as simple as picking up one of their 12 buildings and placing it on an unoccupied spot, then generating the resources and taking the actions depicted on those touching hexes. Congratulations, you now know how to play Ragusa!

That was simple, right? Not on your nelly, mate, decision making in Ragusa is tough.

For a start, you need the resources to be able to build in a spot. Instead of collecting and spending units of the main resources in the game, in Ragusa you increase your production rate. The rates are tracked on little cards that get turned and flipped on your player board to keep track of how many you can use per turn. Some of the resources can be converted into goods to be traded, and you keep track of these with some cool little glass discs on that same player board.

The really tricky part when it comes to choosing where to place your little wooden buildings, is knowing that if you activate a hex, every other player with a building around that hex gets to take that same action after you. Add to that the fact that you get to do those actions once per building you own around that hex, and you can see there’s the potential to benefit everyone else more than yourself by taking your action. As you might imagine, this can lead to a lot agonising over decisions.

Choose your own adventure

Ragusa is another of the current crop of Euro games that offers a lot of different ways to win. When all’s said and done, the player with the most VPs wins, but there’s a lot of ways to get those VPs. It’s not my idea of a point salad, where scoring is all over the shop, but there are choices to make.

The Wharf and Market actions let you influence market prices and trade goods for luxury goods and VPs. It’s a really interesting little economy game that a lot of worker placements don’t do. If commerce doesn’t float your boat, you can choose to build towers and the city walls, to protect the city (which is now Dubrovnik, geography fans).

Players get their own secret bonus cards to score, based on what they’ve accomplished during the game. I really like these bonus cards, as they give players some direction, and it means even if you get squeezed out of a certain action’s area, there are still plenty of ways to win.

The astute among you might have noticed that I said at the top of the review that a turn is placing a building, and that each player has 12 buildings. You don’t have to be Carol Vorderman to realise that means you get 12 turns each. This means there are no unexpected endings, and every player knows exactly when the game will end. I love the drama of revealing your bonus cards at the end and watching hearts get broken as you overtake people who thought they had it in the bag.

First impressions count

Initially, Ragusa was an odd one for me. I pride myself on being able to understand a game pretty easily from the rule book, but I read and re-read the rules, and I tried a two-handed learning game, but I just could not get my head around it. I’m not sure why exactly, but I think some of it is around the lack of visual delineation on the game board. Using the standard side of the board, I found it very difficult to tell what was a country space, and what was a city space. The same goes for the line where the wall gets created, it’s just tricky to see at a glance. Luckily, if you flip the board over, all of these spaces are highlighted better.

I’d strongly advise learning to play the game on the higher-contrast side for the first couple of games, then using the more aesthetically pleasing side when you’re happy.

The other trick is to get all thoughts of city-building out of your head. It’s a worker-placement game, with permanent placement. If you go into Ragusa with this in mind, it makes it all make more sense. Resource spaces are around the outside, actions spaces are in the middle. This ‘permanent placement with cumulative activation effects’ style of play will be immediately familiar with anyone who’s played Fabio’s more recent game, Merv.

The Patrician

Solo players will be pleased to know there’s a very fleshed-out solo game mode. It treats it as a three-player game, with you versus the powerful Patrician. He’s recently married into more money, and is using his in-laws’ cash and influence in addition to his own. That’s why you have two additional colours and player boards to operate, according to the rule book. If the thought of running two bots on top of your own turn is giving you headaches and palpitations, don’t worry. Bot turns are as simple as turning a card and seeing which spot to add a building to, then giving it its resources and actions as if it were a person.

The solo mode reserves a load of building spaces during the setup, so you know where they’ll be building, which is a little different to a normal game. In a way it’s pretty good though, as you can see where is available, and try to build a strategy around it. The bots are extremely well balanced. I played two full solo games just before sitting down to write this review, and my last game saw me win with 118, second place with 114, and third place with 110. Yeah, get me, solo flexing.

Final Thoughts

Let me start this summary by saying, I really like Ragusa. I think it’s a very good game, with great indirect interaction and lots of tricky decisions to make. With that out of the way, I can say that this was almost going to be a very different review for me. My first couple of plays just didn’t click for me. I found it complicated and unrewarding. BUT, it’s a game that gets better and better with subsequent plays.

My initial worries were around the lack of variance in the setup. If I make the comparison with Merv again, in which every time the game is setup, the resource tile placements are completely random. In Ragusa, the action and resource spots are always in the same places. I didn’t like that at first, because it felt like every game had a set pattern. Your first placement always has to be a forest space, to get the wood you need to place that building, then you’ll get stone and try to claim an early city space, and so on. The more I play though, the more I realise that the permanent spots are a strength, not a weakness.

It doesn’t matter that the Silversmith (for example) is always in the same place, because there are six places around it to choose, and each of those will give you the benefit of two other hexes too. With random placement the grapes may have all ended up next to the winery, making those things very powerful and something to fight over. The way the game is designed though, this is impossible, and I really appreciate it now.

Personal space

The city feels very crowded at times. There are buildings, wall segments, and those cool little towers that straddle buildings, and they’re crammed in around the edge of the city. And then there are the names of the spaces, the iconography, and all of the illustrated buildings. There are a couple of building spaces where you almost can’t see the arrow which shows whether actions get triggered for everyone or not. It’s not a big deal when you’re used to it, but it can add to the difficulty when you first learn the game. You’ll find yourself peering under the towers to see what colour building is underneath to make sure everyone gets all the actions they’re entitled to.

I recommend getting a learning play or two in, and maybe even showing new players a couple of example placements before you start the game proper. Even for me with a lot of experience with worker-placement, it still took me a few turns to get my head around. Once you understand it though, the game opens up and becomes a lot of fun. I’ve played games in the past where doing something might provide a benefit to someone as a side-effect, but never to this degree. It makes some of the choices you have to make really tricky, but it’s a fantastic mental tussle. Every time I’ve played it so far, I’ve enjoyed it a bit more than the previous time, and even just writing this paragraph now makes me want to open the box and set it up for another game. I think if you have a regular group Ragusa could get very competitive.

I really like how the game starts off slowly, and by the end, single placements trigger these avalanches of actions. The first couple of turns are simple, and you might get one or two things, but in those eleventh and twelfth turns you’re triggering so much stuff happening for so many people, and it’s enormously satisfying. I think Ragusa is most fun with three or four players, but I haven’t managed to get a five player game in yet.

If you’re after a worker-placement game that does things a little different, or you’re a fan of Fabio Lopiano’s other work, I think you’ll really enjoy Ragusa. As with Venice before, there’s a Tabletop Simulator mod right here, so you can try the game now.

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

Image credits

¹ Dr Meeple

Ragusa (2019) – Braincrack Games

Designer: Fabio Lopiano
Publisher: Braincrack Games
Art: Bartlomiej Roczniak
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 45-90 minutes

The post Ragusa Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If you’ve never heard of the city of Merv, you’re not alone. I had no idea before I heard about this game. It was a rich, powerful city where East met West, and in the 12th and 13th centuries was one of the biggest cities in the world. It was a major trading hub until the early 13th century when the Mongols sacked the city, reportedly killing the entire population and refugees. Merv never recovered, and was permanently razed in the 18th century, and the rest is history.

Sounds like the perfect setting for a Euro game, right?

What’s In The Box?

Before we get inside the box, let’s just pay attention to the box itself. Wow, it’s a stunner, another beautiful piece of shelf-art from Ian O’Toole. When you open the box, things carry on in the same vein. The board is so colourful and vibrant, as are the cards. There are cards representing spices and contracts, and a whole heap of tiles which represent the buildings in the city, which players will be fighting for control of.

There are wooden pieces for each player, including some meeples, a load of little buildings, and some discs. You’ll be ignoring those though, once you start playing with the gorgeous camel meeples. The rule book is one of the big, square types, and does a really good job of giving examples of each of the actions. It’s worth noting that there are couple of errors in the printing, but only with reference to a couple of compass directions in the solo section.

As you’d expect now, with the artist’s pedigree, the graphic design and iconography throughout is clear, pretty and colourful.

How Does It Play?

Merv is a game of fighting for places in a queue around the city in the middle of the board. A grid of 5×5 has 24 buildings randomly assigned, with a camel market tile in the middle. Surrounding this central area are other areas, including a palace, the mosque track, a marketplace, and the caravans of the surrounding trading outpost. Each of these represents an action you can take on your turn.

Building Tension

The lifeblood of Merv is fighting for position however. On their turn, the first player in the queue of meeples can choose any column (or row if they’re on the sides) and claim that row or column. They then choose one of the building spaces in that row, and if they have one available, place one of their buildings there. They then own that space.

As well as having an action type, each building space has a colour, and the player first takes a cube of that colour, AND cubes of the colours of all the other buildings they own in that row or column. If you manage to claim all five in a row, that’s five resources per turn. You can immediately understand the importance of trying to get to the front of the queue then, to ensure that it’s you placing your buildings in line with, or perpendicular to, your others .

Any cubes you gain from that movement and building, you can now use along with any others in your possession, and spend them performing actions.

Action Stations

Once you’ve collected all those lovely resources, which come in orange, magenta, cyan. beige and white (wild) flavours, you can spend them on the various actions. The Caravansary part of the board lets you build outposts in neighbouring cities, and then spend your cubes on common or luxury goods. The different goods require different colour combinations of cubes. Maybe you’ll choose to trade in spices instead, where you can claim cards of matching types (e.g. ginger, juniper, pepper) if you have matching coloured cubes to spend.

There’s a library you can visit, and in there spending cubes of different colours lets you claim that many transcribed scrolls. Down one side of the board is the mosque track, and advancing along it requires different colours depending on which branch you choose to move along. As you move along it, you’ll unlock various bonuses.

There’s an action that lets you spend ever-increasing amounts of cubes to place a meeple in the palace. These courtiers score you points at the end of each year/round, based on the type of action space you place them in, and how much favour you’ve gained with the palace that year.

Finally, there’s a Walls action, which lets you build walls around the city square. This increases your influence, which is one of the tracks in the game, and protects neighbouring buildings when the Mongols invade at the end of the second and third years.

Wheels Within Wheels

If you know what I like from my reviews, you’ll know I love it when games have things that work together, and bonuses you can stack and combine. Merv does not disappoint. When you’re looking at the various actions available, you’d be forgiven for thinking “which should I go for?”, and the truth is that it doesn’t really matter. They will all gain you VPs, and also different bonuses.

Transcribing scrolls at the library for example. when you collect 2, 4, 6 and finally 8 of them, you can claim one of the breakthrough tiles at each level. They let you do things like have a one-cube discount for certain actions, or let you use one colour as another once per turn, so they can really boost your strategies.

Moving up the mosque track is another option, and with each step you move up, you’ll get additional bonuses, such as tiles you can overlay onto your claimed building sites, which generate an additional cube of a certain colour. Similar tiles can be grabbed by collecting pairs of particular spice cards, and these tiles grant you the white, wild cubes on your chose building instead of the usual colour.

All those goods from the caravansary, and the scrolls from the library, can be turned in to collect contracts, which give you VP bonuses or allow you to place soldiers. Oh, we didn’t talk about soldiers yet did we? Instead of using a building’s action on your turn, you can place a soldier meeple on a built building site to both increase your influence, and to protect it during the Mongol raids.

The Horse Designed By Committee

I mentioned the camels at the top of the review, and I also talked about how important the fight for the queue placement is. So I just want to mention how the two work together. At the end of each turn, the player whose meeple is furthest back along the current row or column, moves it to the queue on the next corner, taking the furthest-back space. Then the next player, then the next, etc. So the player the furthest forward, gets the advantage of going first again next turn.

Or do they?

During the game, various actions will give players camels. These can be spent during certain actions like trading and the caravans, but they can be saved and used to influence the turn order for the next turn. When the first player moves to the next queue, they can put a camel down in each of the spaces they want to skip, so if they have enough, they can put themselves at the front of the queue. The next player can do the same, adding to the camels on each spot, or just take their place and claim any camels there as their own.

This decision of when to spend camels to give you that first player advantage is critical, and makes the seemingly simple choice of ‘which row do I claim this turn?’ much harder.

After three trips around the board, which represents three years, the game ends and the player with the most points wins.

Final Thoughts

Merv is a great game, let’s just get that out of the way now. I really, really like the game. Fabio has put together some really well-connected mechanics and the decision-making involved is fantastic. After a couple of games, once I understood the interplay of difference actions and resources, I could really start trying to play with some form of strategy.

Merv For Dummies

One of the biggest complaints I see about the game – mostly from people who haven’t played it – is that they won’t play a game with a dummy player in. Some games have used a dummy, extra player to occupy space and make mechanics work with lower player counts. It’s usually a lazy way to not cope with making changes to the game with those lower player counts. In Merv if you play with one or two players, an additional character is added to the game, the High Courtier (HC).

At a glance, you’d be mistaken for thinking this is a dummy player, but it’s really not. Each turn, the first player chooses which row or column the HC claims, and the second player chooses which building plot they build on. Rather than just blocking though, this placement is very tactical. One thing I didn’t mention in the gameplay overview is that on your turn, instead of activating your own buildings, you can choose to activate another player’s, or the HC’s, and take their actions and cubes. Once you understand that, you can see how playing those extra buildings not only blocks other players, but can be a really useful resource for you.

Reactive Planning

The layout of the city tiles is randomised each time you play, and reading that initial state is the key to doing well, and I love that in a game. The same goes for the spice cards too, the deck is shuffled and the initial layout different each time. Even when you’ve got the initial read of things, and you start formulating a plan, you still need to be so reactive, especially in the first year. Players will get in your way, block your rows, take the things you had your eye on, and you’ve got to have a Plan B, and a Plan C, just in case.

This could lead to a really frustrating situation if it was left unchecked, as a good player could lock up really useful places and leave the others limited for options. However, turns are finite, and each player only gets 12 over the course of the game. Unless players spend some of those turns placing soldiers of building walls, they’re likely to lose some of those buildings during the Mongol raid at the end of the second year. Those spots are then fair game during the final year for the other players to claim and build on.

As well as the various actions and resources, there are also two main tracks that come into play. The influence track determines how many different types of spice you can trade for, and which value of contract you can fulfill, while the honour track is spent at the end of each year to score points for the courtiers you might have in the palace.

Putting It All Together

Some people have said there are dominant strategies and actions to take in Merv, but personally I’ve not witnessed it. I’ve won and lost games to players concentrating on different things. When I’ve made conscious efforts to just climb the mosque track, or just build outposts and dominate the caravansary, I’ve won and lost.

Merv just feels great to play. Even setting it up on the table, with all the bright colours and illustrations, puts a smile on your face. Turns are so simple, and there’s very little fuss in doing anything in the game. This combined with the clear iconography means that after just one learning play of the game, you can concentrate on your strategy. There’s no hidden information, so any strategies are yours to figure out, if you know your opponents well enough.

I have a love/hate relationship with games with a limited number of turns. You never have enough turns to do everything, and those 12 turns disappear quickly. To do well you have to set out your stall early and decide: am I going to be Jack of all trades and master of none, or am I Captain Library for the next hour.

Merv is a game that just feels satisfying. When you start the game there’s this empty city square, and by the end it’s covered in buildings, soldiers and upgrades, and walls and gates surround it. It’s not a town or civilization building game, but it gives that look and feel to all involved.

Solo Options

There’s a really well-made solo game in the box, and it’s with an automa opponent (yay!). Your foe in this mode is called the Corrupt Magistrate, and its actions are driven by a deck of cards. The way its deck is created is clever too, as it will concentrate on three of the main actions, and the palace, and you don’t know which it will be until you start playing. The rules for it placing buildings and taking actions are very clear and easy, and the two of you also drive the actions of the High Courtier, as per the two-player game.

As I mentioned above, in the current printing there are a couple of areas in the solo rules that don’t make sense. It refers to both the cities on the caravansary area, and the trails on the mosque area as if they were both rotated 90 degrees clockwise, but once you understand that, it’s all clear. It comes as a result of the solo rules going to print before the design of the board was finalised.

Recommended?

Absolutely. If you like your Euros with quite a lot of indirect player interaction (the blocking) and plenty of routes to victory, this is a fantastic option. The solo mode is very good, and hard to beat, which is a real boon during these times of lockdown, at the time of writing. It’s quick to learn, easy to understand, and it’s a beautiful thing to have on your shelf and table. Gamers and non-gamers alike can’t help to be drawn in by the colours, the walls around the city, and of course, my favourite, those wonderful little camels.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in the UK, if you shop around you can buy Merv for less than £30. For that price, it’s hard to find a reason to not buy it.

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