One in, one out

At its core, Raiders of Scythia is a worker placement game. It does things a bit differently though, because for every worker you put down on the board, you take another one off. It’s a bit like going to a crowded nightclub back in the 90s – “it’s one in, one out, mate” – or maybe a more relatable comparison would be a library. You want to take that natty red worker off the board? Okay chap, but you’ve got to bring that blue one back first.

It’s a clever twist, because the worker you take off the board can’t be the same one you put on, and you can’t put a worker on a spot where one is already stood. Given that there are only eight spaces available to leave and take workers, it means you’re going to face some tricky decisions, and often have to take what you’d consider to be sub-optimal actions. By way of compensation though, you get to take the actions of both the space you’re placing a worker into, and the space you take them from. It doesn’t always make up for the sting of not being able to do that one really good thing you really wanted to do.

I mentioned the colour of the workers above, because a worker’s colour becomes really important. Some of the placement spots give you different rewards depending on which colour of worker is placed or removed. At the start of the game, there’s only grey and blue workers to contend with, but later in the game red workers are also thrown into the mix. That only happens when you start raiding though.

Loot and pillage

Scythia was a region that covered a lot of Asia and Eastern Europe, around 2,000 years ago. Legend has it they bred fierce warriors, and were no strangers to war and conflict. The setting of Raiders of Scythia puts the players in control of a leader, and the aim of the game (if the name wasn’t a big enough clue) is to go raiding. The resources you collect with your workers get spent in building your crew – a tableau of cards in front of you who you’ll take into battle with you. Trained eagles and horses can bolster your crew before you take them off for a spot of pillaging.

Raiding makes up the guts of the game, and it’s really nicely done. At first you’re making small raids for small rewards in the nearby settlements of Cimmeria, but by the end of the game you’ll have progressed across the map to Greece. When you choose to raid is entirely up to you, and it’s a tricky decision to make. You can raid as soon as you the required crew size, worker colour, and resources, but you might choose not to.

The raiding action gets you rolling dice. Some of these dice add to the collective strength of your crew cards, and some will add wounds to your brave fighters. The higher your total score after the dice are rolled, the greater your reward, so there’s plenty of thinking, and deciding when you think your loyal band is strong enough. If you take another couple of turns to bolster your squad, you stand a better chance of the better rewards, but what if someone else swoops in there first? I’d love to say you’ll sit there working over probabilities in your head, but the truth is you’ll go with your gut, and that’s something I really love in a game.

A plague of locusts

Euro games get a lot of stick for not being thematic enough, but Raiders of Scythia does a great job of capturing the feel of what’s going on in the game. After setup, the board is brimming with loot, rewards, and spoils for the taking. As the game progresses and your warbands grow in strength, they gradually move south, taking down more powerful settlements and stripping them of their rewards. By the time the game finishes, you’ll look down at the board, and it looks like people have been panic-buying at a supermarket. The gradual ingress of your troops empties the board.

If I’m honest, I felt slightly uneasy the first time it happened. It’s a strange thing for me, I’m usually able to see a game as a game, but when I saw those nations ransacked and left destroyed in my wake, I felt bad about it. I don’t know why, I don’t really feel it with other games. It was almost like I was a spectator as my irresistible war machine marched on, and if they’d carried on they’d be off the board and I’d be left with the smoking holes in the ground they left behind them.

It’s a very evocative game for me in that sense, even though the actual battles are so far abstracted. There’s no visible bloodshed or death, save for occasionally discarding a card, but it still manages to capture the essence of the raiding so well. It’s a very clever piece of game design.

Final thoughts

Shem Phillips is my favourite game designer and developer at the moment. The West Kingdom series of games (Architects, Paladins & Viscounts) are some of my favourite games ever. I really enjoy the games he designs or helps to develop, and Raiders of Scythia is no exception. The gameplay is relatively easy to learn and the concepts easy to grasp, but the game feels wonderfully tactical. Despite there being no direct player interaction, the indirect tussle for worker spots and settlements to raid feels really good.

Raiders has plenty of classic Euro action, with the worker-placement and the tableau-building on your player board, but I really enjoy the uncertainty of other things in there. Judging how long to wait to attempt a Raid, and balancing your crew’s strength against the odds of a successful dice roll is great. Not knowing when your opponents are planning to do the same thing, gauging the people, not just the state of the board. It all adds up to a really exciting game.

The solo mode runs as smoothly and balanced as you’d expect from a Garphill Game. Flip a card, work down through the actions and see which one the automa can do. It feels like playing against a person, and is a great way of practicing when you’re on your own. It’s a great game at two-player, but really comes alive with three and four. It opens up new spaces on the board to raid, and the competition feels more intense. Games seem to be creeping up in price at the moment, so to be able to pick up Raiders of Scythia for 40 quid is a great proposition, even if Sam Phillips’ artwork doesn’t do it for you. It’s a brilliant game, and it joins my ever-growing pile of Garphill Games square boxes.

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

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

Raiders of Scythia (2020)

Designer: Shem Phillips
Publisher: Garphill Games
Art: Sam Phillips
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Raiders Of Scythia Review appeared first on Punchboard.

We’re heading back to Garphill Games’ West Kingdom, taking a look at the first game in the trilogy. I started the series with Paladins, then Viscounts, and now I’m looping back around to the game that started it all – Architects of the West Kingdom. In terms of complexity, Architects is the lightest of the three games, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it isn’t as interesting, or as much fun as its sequels.

Set roughly 50 years before Paladins, Architects of the West Kingdom puts you in the role of a royal architect. Wanting to keep your noble status, you set to work gathering resources and money, endeavouring to build the most impressive buildings and landmarks in the Kingdom. It’s not all plain sailing though, as the other architects (your rival players) are out to do the same. This leaves you with a choice: rise above such petty competition and remain virtuous, or resort to thievery and hit the black market like it’s the Next Boxing Day sale.

Work experience

Architects of the West Kingdom is a worker-placement game in the classic style. It’s not a game like The Lost Ruins of Arnak, where there is worker-placement, but you only have two workers. In Architects you start with 20 workers, and an absolute ton of places you can put them. My first impression was “Wow, this reminds me of Stone Age”, and I can tell you that in my books, that’s high praise. Stone Age was my first worker-placement game, and it’s a game I still love dearly, all these years later.

Taking your turn in Architects is really simple. Take a player from your board and place them on any available work spot. For every worker of your colour now in that spot, your reward grows. That might mean your third worker in the Quarry nets you three pieces of stone, instead of one if it was your first worker placed there. In the Workshop, which acts as a market to hire new apprentices, the more workers you have, the further along the market rows you can choose from.

It’s such a simple concept, but one which works really well. Your first few turns feel really uneventful, just taking the odd resource here and there. Pretty soon though, things start to snowball, and you can start to tell how the other players intend to set out their stall. While in Stone Age there is really only two ways to score, and everybody competes for them, in Architects of the West Kingdom there are a few different ways to chase those elusive VPs. It means you can choose to take a different path to your rivals, or directly compete with them, which gives it the same feeling that Paladins and Viscounts carry through the rest of the series.

Banged-up

When you first start playing, it feels great to have all these workers available right from the start. It doesn’t take long to realise, however, that unlike in other worker-placement games, you don’t pick your workers back up. Once you place them on the board, they stay there. I remember my first learning playthrough, and thinking to myself “Okay, so you have 20 turns, one per worker”, which didn’t feel like enough. It was about then that I started playing with the Town Centre placement spot.

The Town Centre allows you to choose a space on the board, and to capture all of one player’s workers on that spot, moving them to your player board. This is the rivalry between the architects in action. Thematically you believe someone’s up to no good, or getting too greedy, so you make the equivalent of a citizen’s arrest. After all, you’re nobles, you wouldn’t lie about something like that, right? On a later turn you can drop them off at the prison for one piece of silver each. Reward for performing your civic duty, indeed!

You can visit the Guardhouse on a later turn to free any prisoners of your colour, and release them back to your board to use again later, and it’s a brilliant mechanism. So few Euro games offer this level of direct player interaction and scuppering of plans, it’s a breath of fresh air. What makes it especially clever is the way it allows you to change tactics later in the game. Workers freed from one place can go on to work somewhere else later, and there’s direct impetus to capture other players’ workers, as you can make a lot of coin by doing it.

Going solo

Garphill Games know how to make an automa opponent, and Architects of the West Kingdom is no exception. The solo mode is simple to understand and quick to run. There’s no faffing about, and the two different opponents – Constantine and Helena – give you two different difficulty levels to play against. The bot feels fair and balanced, and they’ll push you to play your best game.

The other really nice thing you can do with the bot is introduce it into a two-player game. Architects is fun with two, but at its best with three and four players, so being able to play a three-player game when there’s only two of you around a table is a really nice touch.

Final thoughts

I really like games on the heavier end of the complexity scale, and because I’d played Paladins and Viscounts first, I was worried that Architects might feel a bit too light for me to really enjoy. I needn’t have worried. Architects is lighter than the other two games, but it’s still a solid medium-weight game. The trademark iconography that carries through to all of the games in the series is easy to interpret, and immediately familiar to anyone who’s played any of the other games. The Mico’s artwork can be polarising, but if you like his illustration style, you’ll love this too.

I felt real nostalgia and happiness when the game evoked memories of playing Stone Age, and I’m a really big fan of simple actions in worker-placement games. Put a meeple here, get the thing that’s printed on the board. No fuss, no obfuscation, just quick, easy turns. It’s for this reason that I think Architects of the West Kingdom will now be my go-to worker-placement introduction game. The player interaction that the capturing and releasing of other players’ workers brings to the game means it’s a fantastic game to try to tempt Euro-phobes with too. The complaint, which usually rings true with a lot of Euro games, is that they’re mostly multiplayer solitaire. No-one could accuse Architects of that.

If you enjoy pure worker-placement games, and you don’t already have Architects of the West Kingdom, you should get it, it’s as simple as that. It’s cheap these days, plays from one to five players, and is quick to pick up. Satisfyingly thinky without making it complicated, and it feels fun to come back to time and time again. It’s a cracking game, and it’s found a permanent home in my collection.

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

Architects of the West Kingdom (2018)

Designers: Shem Phillips, S J Macdonald
Publisher: Garphill Games, Renegade Game Studios
Art: Mihajlo Dimitrievski
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-90 mins

Age of Artisans expansion

Age of Artisans is the first expansion for Architects of the West Kingdom. It throws in a few nice changes, but does it without making the game overly complicated, or drastically altering the way the game is played. There’s a new, socketed Guildhall board to place on top of the main board, along with a new card to cover a spot in the Black Market, with some new iconography. The expansion explains that we now have master craftsmen returning to the kingdom, and they can add adornments to buildings, or create tools to improve your apprentices’ abilities.

What that all means to you and I, is a new deck of dual-use cards, which can be bought and added to your buildings and apprentices to improve them. It’s a relatively simple change to the base game, but it adds some really interesting new choices. You can use the new cards to really min-max your strategy (i.e. go heavily for buildings and adorn them), or to off-set weaker areas. Along with the new cards, each player gets an additional Artisan meeple. This bigger, chunkier worker counts as two workers when you place them (powerful!), and it also reduces the loss of virtue you’d normally suffer for some of the less savoury actions on the board.

Table for six, sir?

The other really nice addition that Age of Artisans brings, is a new player colour – orange – and along with it, the ability to play up to six-player games. I haven’t had a chance to get six players around a table yet to try it (thanks Covid-19), but having played with four, I can see how six would be chaotic, and a lot of fun. There’s a couple of new player boards in the box too, which offer some new initial setups for players, and breathe a bit of life back into the game if you’ve played it to death already.

The excellent solo game from the base game also makes the transition to Age of Artisans really easily too. The AI player takes adornments with a really simple decision process, and games against it still feel really balanced and fair.

Final thoughts

Age of Artisans is a really nice expansion. It adds plenty of new depth without changing the base game too much. It’s very easy to learn the new actions and features, and if you don’t feel confident using them, you can still compete just using the base game actions. At a shade under £30, it’s quite an expensive expansion when you consider what’s in the box, but when you consider the fact that the Garphill games are usually very reasonable, I don’t think it’s too bad.

If you’ve not played Architects of the West Kingdom yet, play it a few times before getting this expansion, just to make sure it’s a good fit with your group. If you’ve played it and loved it, then Age of Artisans is a great choice. It’s adds plenty to increase the lifespan of the game, and the addition of a sixth player is great. There are so few euro games at all, let alone worker-placement games, that play up to six, so it’s a fantastic option if you have a bigger group.

Expansion kindly provided by Garphill Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Age of Artisans (2020)

Designer: Shem Phillips, S J Macdonald
Publisher: Garphill Games, Renegade Game Studios
Art: Mihajlo Dimitrievski
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Architects of the West Kingdom Review (+ Age of Artisans) appeared first on Punchboard.

What is an automa?

Let’s start at the beginning. What is an automa? You might have seen the term thrown about a lot in the last year or so, as the pandemic forced people to search for solo options. An automa is a simulated opponent for a board game, who the player controls, usually with a deck of cards. The term was coined by the famous automa designer, Morten Monrad Pedersen. While working on the solo mode for Viticulture (a wine-making game set in Italy), someone suggested the name ‘automa’, the Italian word for automaton. The name stuck, and he founded the Automa Factory, a company that board game developers can contract to create solo modes for their games.

Sometimes you’ll hear these solo opponents referred to as AI. Although it means largely the same thing, there’s a small, but subtle difference. In my opinion anyway. An automa tends to be an opponent who doesn’t need, or use, things like resources in games. Their actions more often instruct the player to give the automa some kind of reward from the game (e.g. give place a building on their behalf), but not by collecting and spending the resources. Instead, through clever playtesting, the rate the automa takes these thing to compete with, or impede the human, roughly mirrors a real opponent. AI opponents on the other hand, usually collect and spend resources, just like a real person. It’s a subtle, but important difference.

Automated opponents – What are your options?

Let’s start this off with looking at three of the best automated opponents, and their designers.

Automa Factory

I’ve already mentioned Automa Factory above, so let’s start there. The majority of the titles they’ve worked on are for Stonemaier Games. Automa Factory games work with a deck of cards that are split into two halves. By matching the right-side of the left card to the left-side of the right card when the two are placed side by side, you’re given a prioritised list of things to do. If the automa can do the first thing, do that, if not, read the next one down, and so on. Other parts of the cards often give you other things to do at the end of a round, or symbols may tell you when the automa passes, ready for the next round. For the next turn, the card on the left slides over the one on the right to replace it, and a new one is dealt next to it. Simple.

Automa Factory games are really easy to run, with very little fuss. I don’t think I could pick a single recommendation, because a lot of it comes down to the theme of the game you want to play. If you want a traditional ‘turn one thing into another thing’ euro, go for Viticulture: Essential Edition. If you want something with a bit more theme, look to the smash hit, alternate history, Euro-in-mechs-clothing Scythe. And if you want something a bit ‘friendlier’ on the table, check out the bird-attracting, tableau-building, eggcellent (sorry) Wingspan. My own personal favourite Automa Factory game is Gaia Project, which is a fantastic game of space exploration and empire-building which I really need to review (note to self).

The Automa Factory games provide a really good opponent, and the scores, turns and interactions really duplicate the feel of playing against a human. It’s already at the stage where spotting their logo on a game is almost a guarantee of a good solo version.

Garphill Games

In a lot of Garphill games there’s a solo mode, and more often than not, it’s against an excellent automated opponent. The West Kingdom games in particular, really manage to capture the feel of playing against a human opponent. Shem and Sam work together in an iterative process to refine the solo mode, until we get the finished product in the box. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I love both Paladins of the West Kingdom and Viscounts of the West Kingdom. Solo play in these games is similar to Automa Factory, in as much as the opponent’s actions are determined by flipping a card. Things get more clever from here though.

Both of those games use one of the player boards, flipped over, for the special AI modes. Paladins gives three different setups, for easy, medium and hard difficulty levels, which is great. Viscounts on the other hand, has four different AI boards, each of which concentrates its efforts on one of the main scoring mechanisms in the game. It really feels like playing against different personalities. It also has to collect and spend resources, just like I do, and this makes things feel fair. I’m not too proud to admit I’ve had a few ‘Ha! Screw you!” moments when the AI hasn’t been able to afford something really good.

The scores are comparable to playing against a person, and the gameplay feels like playing against someone. Importantly, they are very easy to run. Once you’ve played against them once, you won’t need the rule book to play solo again. That’s especially important in a game as heavy as these, as you need your brain to work out what the heck you’re going to do, never mind running a complex opponent too.

Dávid Turczi

Dávid’s been brought in to create solo modes in a lot of different games over the years, as well as creating a few games that are completely of his own design. I’ve covered one of each of these, in my Teotihuacan and Tawantinsuyu reviews, respectively. His solo designs are unique, and I really like how they work.

If we take a look at Anachrony and Tawatinsuyu (both completely his own design), the opponents really are AIs. They even have names! In Anachrony you square-off against Chronobot (now being replaced with Chronossus in an expansion), and in Tawantinsuyu you fight for victory against Axomamma. In both, the AI has a custom player board, numbered tokens, and a special die. You roll the die, find the numbered token that matches, carry out the action, and then move the token along. In both games though, the AI needs to gain and spend the resources to carry out its actions. It’s a really clever way of running things, and shows how much work must go into development, balancing the mathematics of chance with the die rolls.

Both of those examples look far more intimidating when you first set them up, than they actually are to run. Thanks to clear rules and good iconography, you won’t need the rule book again to figure out what they’re doing. Much like with the Garphill Games, this is really important, as these games are heavy enough at the best of times.

Worth getting just to play by yourself?

If you’re asking about any of the games I mentioned above, then yes, absolutely. Every game I’ve mentioned so far is an excellent option for solo gamers, and I either have, or would, pay just to play them alone. The reasons the first two systems above work so well, is because although they make you step down through a series of priorities on each turn of a card, the actions are always easy to carry out. There’s very little in the way of calculation or deduction to do, so the automa’s turns pass quickly.

Things aren’t always so good though, and I think it’s worth highlighting what makes for a disappointing solo opponent, in my opinion. I’ve not played against an automated opponent yet that’s outright bad, but there’s one thing that can really sour things for me, and that’s making the automa’s turn take longer than mine.

The culprits

I should preface this section by saying that this is entirely my opinion, and that in both cases I absolutely love both of the games below. Seriously, they’re very good games. The issue for me is the amount of time I need to spend referring to rule books, or performing mental arithmetic during the AI’s turns. As I mentioned above, when you’re playing a game which requires strategy, planning, and thought, the last thing you need to be doing is two things at once. I speak from experience as a parent who’s spent a lot of time in the last year trying to do a demanding full-time job, and home-school an eight-year-old at the same time.

Clans of Caledonia

Clans of Caledonia is a fantastic game. There’s a reason why it sits so high in the BGG rankings, and why it gets recommended to Euro game fans all of the time. Out-of-the-box, Clans comes with a beat-your-own-score mode which is functional, but nothing special. In a game about expanding your control over a shared map, and influencing market prices between players, it doesn’t really do it justice. A special automa was brought out after release, which players can download and print for free (there’s also a digital version). The problem with it though is how tricky it is to run.

Some actions it carries out are pretty easy, but others feel like a test. I challenge anyone to resolve its Expand action without thinking about it. The same goes with certain market actions, the calculations you have to carry out to see how much money the automa takes, if any, are like school homework. It doesn’t mean the solo mode is bad, far from it, the scoring and interaction is very good. It’s just very high maintenance, and in my experience I spent longer carrying out its turns than my own. It should be the opposite.

Merv

Yep, the same Merv I reviewed and really like. The solo mode is really good, and very tough to beat, but I found myself keeping the rulebook open on the solo rules to work out its choices and placements over and over again. In a game with only 12 turns each, it felt like a lot. I really like the solo mode, but it definitely needs a something to make it smoother.

If you’ve not read the review yet, each turn takes place in a specific order, and as well as moving yourself and the Corrupt Magistrate (your opponent), you also both control a third player, called the High Courtier. It’s like some kind of messy divorce, with you and the Magistrate saying “well this time I’m placing him, you can have your turn next time”. There’s a tricky set of rules of precedence to decide where the automa places his and the High Courtier’s buildings, and I end up checking the rules for it every, single, turn.

Of course, that might just say more about me than the game, but I think it could really have done with some kind of player aid or reference for it. If there was a good player aid on a board, I don’t know if this game would even have been included here.

Just to reiterate that neither of the games above are bad. Far from it. The solo opponents both play a very good game too but for players new to solo games, the experience could be off-putting compared to something like an Automa Factory game.

Solo gaming – a summary

Hopefully you know a little more about what makes an automa tick now. I can’t begin to understand how people can create them, but I’m extremely grateful that they have. Between these and beat-your-own-score modes, there are a lot of really good solo options out there now which don’t feel like a disappointing compromise.

There’s a growing list of people whose names alone are enough to convince me the solo mode will be worth playing, and it’s already becoming an expectation among the board game community that a solo mode should be in a new game. I’m already seeing complaints in Kickstarter campaigns when big-name games are being funded without a solo mode. Solo mode designers even have their own section on a game’s credits on BGG now.

Some games will never work for solo. Social deduction, auction games, take-that mechanics, party games – there’s a big list where it just isn’t viable. But there’s enough good stuff out there now, and far more on the way, to make solo board gaming an excellent hobby to take up. I’ve seen some people turn their nose up at it, scoff, and ask “what’s the point of a solo board game? It won’t be any good. I can just play a video game“. Yes, you can. I do too. However, a lot of the strategy games that people will spend years of their lives playing on a computer are just running the same branching decisions and algorithms that we’ve got in board games now. But with a board game we have the added bonus of being able to look away from a screen, to play with something tactile, warm, and personal. It’s not a compromise, it’s a choice.

If you have any questions or comments, please just leave a message below, or scroll to the top of the page and find me on social media. I’ll be more than happy to talk to you (exhaustively!) about solo games.

The post Solo Modes In Board Games – Part Two (Automa) appeared first on Punchboard.

Designer: Shem Phillips, S J MacDonald
Publisher: Garphill Games / Renegade Game Studios
Art: Mihajlo Dimitrievski
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 minutes

Introduction

First we had Architects, which was a bit like a grown-up Stone Age worker placement game. A good game, but not too heavy. Then came Paladins, which really upped the ante and got a lot heavier, and did a really nice twist on the standard worker placement formula. Towards the end of 2020, Viscounts arrived, and one was of a growing trend of combining deck-building and other mechanics.

In this game we’re sending our viscounts around the kingdom, constructing buildings, transcribing manuscripts, and increasing our nobles’ influence in the castle. To do that we’re using our band of townsfolk and criminals, gaining deeds and converting debts, trying to prove ourselves the most powerful.

What’s In The Box?

Shem Phillips’ games come in these neat, square boxes. They don’t take up much space, but getting all the pieces in there is a task in itself sometimes (cough.. Paladins). There’s plenty in the Viscounts box too.

The board is made up of five sections, each of which are double-sided, The side you use depends on the number of players. You place them down in random order, then the plastic castle – randomly oriented – locks the boards in place with an extremely satisfying click. Then there are piles of cardboard manuscripts placed around the board, and piles of townsfolk cards.

Resources in Viscounts are represented with wooden inkwells, gold and stone, along with the now de-facto cardboard coins (or metal if you’re lucky enough to have upgraded them). The player boards are thin card, much like the ones from Terraforming Mars. They’re the only thing which feels cheap in the game, but I understand why they’re so thin. I’m not sure everything would have fit in the box if they were thick cardstock.

Cards On The Table

As you might expect in a game with deck-building, there are quite a lot of cards included in Viscounts. There’s a starting deck of cards for each player, which are identical, and then a deck of townsfolk who can later be added to players’ decks. Finally, for the full-size cards there’s a deck of AI cards for the solo mode.

There’s also a whole bunch of the smaller size cards that feature in the other games. There’s a stack each of debts and deeds, which play an important role in the game, and some other cards for marking bonuses for actions later in the game.

The quality of all of the components, as you’d expect by now, is really high. The only negative is as I mentioned above, the player boards are more like player mats. Shiny card. But the big difference between this game and something like Terraforming Mars, is that the main things you’ll place on this board are cards, so a small bump or two won’t matter even if things do move.

How Does It Play?

So, we’ve got our boards placed in a random order, and the castle’s clicked into the middle. Each player has their starting deck, their board, and they added a combination of starting resources and Hero card, which gets shuffled into their deck. The viscount markers go to their designated spots on the board, and we can start.

Action Stations

As you might expect from a euro game, the core of Viscounts revolves around taking actions. At the most basic level, a turn consists of playing a card onto your board (more on this later), moving your viscount the requisite number of spaces printed on that card, and then taking an action.

There are three main ways to score points in Viscounts, and each of these has an associated action. Constructing a Building lets you take a spend hammers and stone, take a building from your player board, and occupy a space around the outer ring of the board. As you might expect, there are bonuses from doing this. The spot you build on gives you something, if you build next to another building and there’s a line between them, both building owners get whatever’s on that line, and the space on your board where that building used to live, now gives you something extra. Nice.

While you’re on that outer ring, you could be trading instead, Trading sees you cashing in your silver and any money bag icons on your board in exchange for resources, or flipping deed or debt cards. This is an important action that we’ll touch on later.

If you follow paths to the inner circle of the board, there are a couple more actions to take. You could Place Workers, where spending a combination of gold and fleur de lis symbols let you add your workers to the lowest tier of the castle. This section is great fun, as when you manage to get three of your workers in one section, one moves to the space to the left, one to the right, and the third goes up a tier, giving you a bonus action or resource. Where this gets interesting though, is that if any of those workers you moved is now the third of yours in a section, the same thing happens again! And again! You get this deeply satisfying cascade of movement and bonuses from the centrepiece of the board.

Finally you could spend crosses and inkwells to transcribe manuscripts, taking the tokens from the board, gaining the bonuses on them, and setting up some set collection for end of game scoring. Any purple criminal icons are wild, and count towards any action.

Decked-Out

Even on its own, that sounds like a satisfying game in its own right. But we haven’t even looked at the player boards yet, or those cards in our hands. On your turn, you slide any cards on your board a space to the right, eventually dropping off to form a discard pile. You choose one from your hand of three cards, and play it into the now-empty space. Some cards have an immediate effect, giving you something when you play it. Some have a dropping-off effect, triggered when they fall off the end of the board, and others have an ongoing effect for the time they’re in play.

Each of these cards has one or more symbols on them, which relate to the actions from the section above. To take an action, you total up the matching symbols and the resources you have that you want to spend. So for example, to build a building you’re combining hammer icons and stones. The more of each thing you have, the more potent the version of the action you can take.

I did mention right at the top, waaaay back up there, that this game has deck-building, so what did I mean? At the end of a turn, you can buy the card next to your viscount for the cost printed on it, and add it to your discard pile. In the tradition of most deck-builders (Though not Aeon’s End), the discard pile is eventually shuffled and recycled into your draw pile. There are other actions which let you destroy cards from your deck, removing them from the game. By combining these things it’s possible to build a deck that’s very strong at one thing, by adding more of those type of symbols, and weaker in others, by weeding them out of your deck.

“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”

The last thing to mention are the two sets of polar opposites employed in the game: deeds & debts, and virtue & corruption.

Deed and debt cards are acquired throughout the game, Deeds give you 1 VP, or three when flipped, and debts are worth -2 VPs, which are cancelled if flipped and give you a free resource. It’s collecting these cards that triggers the end of the game too. Partway down each of the decks (deeds and debts) there’s a larger card, which, when revealed, signals the last turn of the game. In a fun twist though, revealing the card in the deeds debt rewards the player with the most flipped debts, and vice-versa. This means there’s a see-saw of players making sure they have enough of the deck that looks like it’s going to get triggered, which in turn moves that deck closer to being the one which triggers the end. The tension!

Finally, on each player’s board there’s a track representing virtue and corruption. A black marker starts on one end, a white one on the other. Certain actions cause the markers for one or the other to move towards each other, and when they collide there’s a resolution phase. This sees the player take a number of deeds or debts, before resetting and starting the track again. At first it doesn’t seem that important, but when you consider that pushing that track all the way to one end gives you three deeds or debts, it becomes really important to keep an eye on.

All of this pushing and shoving carries on until the end of the game is triggered, then players total up the points from what they’ve accomplished, plus any bonuses. Then to the victor, the spoils! If you don’t have any spoils, maybe replace it with a cup of tea and a chocolate hobnob.

Final Thoughts

Viscounts of the West Kingdom is a great game. I could probably just leave it there and you’d know all you need to, but you’re out of luck, because I want to tell you why I like it so much,

King Of The Castle

I have no shame in saying that one of my favourite things in this deep, strategic game, is moving all the little dudes around on the castle. It’s ridiculously satisfying. Lots of games have actions that combo up and give you stuff, but none do it in such a fun, toy-like way. I take an inordinate amount of pleasure from moving the pieces around and telling everyone else – in explicit detail – what I’m doing.

“So i add my guys here, then this one goes here, that one goes there, and this one goes up a level and gets me a free move on the first tier. I move him, there, and trigger another one. This guy goes up, flips a debt for me (thank you very much), now there’s three in there, so up he goes again to the top, and now I take a resource, and the castle lead card. Oh, and look down here, there’s four in this section now, and two of them are yours? Oh dear, off you get then. My castle! Adam’s castle!“

Yeah, I can be pretty annoying to play games with.

That’s just one part of the puzzle though. Getting the buildings off your board gives you some really powerful bonuses, like permanent bonus icons for your preferred action, and clearing a full set of buildings is worth loads of points. Collecting manuscripts is the real sleeper strategy though, the initial bonuses on them aren’t always extravagant, but the bonuses for collecting sets of different coloured ones, and the bonus cards for being first to collect three of a kind, they can lead to some crazy end-of-game scoring.

Getting The Full Picture

One thing I found in my first few plays, is that it’s very easy to get drawn into this mindset of ‘see what cards I have, see what I can do, do that, repeat’. Playing this way however, you’re not really taking advantage of the gimmick (and I really don’t like that term) of having deck-building. Choosing which cards to destroy when you can, and which you recruit into your deck, is one of those things which shows its importance more with each play.

There are usually small margins in victory in Viscounts, and a carefully crafted deck means you can do your preferred action maybe even just one more time than your opponent, and that can be the difference between winning and losing. Destroying cards not only refines your deck, but you also get the value of the card back in silver, which is also vital for certain things. You will undoubtedly reach a point in one of your games where the thing you need to complete your master plan is one… space… further… than you can move, and that single silver piece can be spent to increase your range by one.

That’s the sort of margins we’re talking about here.

Set Your Own Pace

It’s no secret that I love heavy euro games. One thing that I’ve noticed in a lot of the games I played last year is that you can always see the end of the game. In Merv you get twelve turns. In Praga Caput Regni it’s something like 16. Even in Shem’s own Paladins of the West Kingdom, there are eight rounds, then it’s done. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind that at all, all of those games are fantastic. What it leads to though is a lot of over-analysis for the last turn, trying to squeeze the maximum points from it.

In Viscounts, the end is driven by the deed and debt decks, and when one runs out. It’s maybe a subtle difference, but an important one to me. It’s something normally in older or more light- or middle-weight games, like Stone Age, Dominion, or even Ticket To Ride. Seeing it again in Viscounts made me really appreciate the tension and meta game it brings, keeping an eye on your opponents, the cards remaining, where the virtue and corruptions are, trying to figure out if it’s worth triggering the end and watching people scramble for the last points.

Any Pieces Missing?

The danger when combining mechanics in a game is whether all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Nobody wants a jigsaw with a piece missing, or the wrong shaped holes and nobbles? tongues? Whatever the sticky-outy bits on a jigsaw piece are called. Anyway, I digress. Viscounts marries everything together really nicely.

There is so much randomness in setup that no two games will feel the same, and there are a lot of different ways to play, and no dominant strategy. You’ll see people say that filling the castle is an easy road to win every time, but when you compare the points available for completing all the castle actions, buildings, and the maximum realistic amount of manuscripts, it really isn’t.

The deck-building is really clever. Balancing who is in your deck, who you recruit or dismiss during you turn, the order you move them across your board, and combining the icons and effects on them, it’s really nicely done. Much like moving and taking actions, the card management feels like a game in its own right, but the really important thing here is that although each part feels like a game, the way they combine is nigh-on perfect.

Deck-building, area control, resource management, player board upgrading – it’s all there, and it all works.

“Dancing With Myself, Oh Oh, Dancing With Myself”

Even Billy Idol had to entertain himself sometimes, so it’s a good job there’s a full solo mode in the box. Shem puts proper opponents in his solo games, which I really like in a solo game, and Viscounts is another excellent example of how to do it well. Paladins’ opponent was great, with variable difficulty, and Viscounts goes even further. The reverse side of each of the player mats has a different AI to play against, each focusing on a different favoured action. It’s really well done, really easy on the housekeeping, and thanks to the clear iconography and excellent player aids is really easy to do.

Solo doesn’t feel like a “I’ll have to make do with this instead of real people” option, it’s really enjoyable experience deserving to be played even if you have a regular group around you.

The TL;DR Bit

In summary Viscounts is awesome. It plays smooth, it’s great fun, it’s on the heavy side. The deck-building works, the components are great, the solo is fantastic. You can play differently every time you play, which keeps things fresh. You’ll know how to play it within your first game, and the teach is pretty painless too. If you like Garphill Games‘ other West Kingdom games, I think you’ll love this. The Mico’s distinctive art style might not be for everyone, but it’s the signature on these games, and personally I love it.

It’s cheaper than most of the games being released now, and it deserves a space in any euro fan’s collection. Is it better than Paladins? ….hmmm, ask me this time next year.

The post Viscounts Of The West Kingdom Review appeared first on Punchboard.