Alchemy

The story – like it matters – is that you and the other players are alchemists, and wouldn’t you just know it, you’ve discovered how to transmute base metals into gold. What a result! Between you, you’re trying to perfect the formula…

…skip-to-the-end, here’s a game.

The rules for Aurum are pretty simple, with a couple of little outliers to remember. You can lead a trick with any suit but gold. You must not play a card of any suit already in the trick. The highest value card wins the trick. Gold trumps all suits.

At the start of each round, you choose a card from your hand and play it face-up to make a bid. Your bid is how many tricks you expect to win. At any time you can play a gold card from your stash of gold cards to replace that bid with another, but that costs you a precious gold.

So far, so by-the-book, right? Gold cards are super-good. Not only do they trump all other suits (i.e. you can win a trick by playing a zero-value gold – nice), and not only do they let you swap your bid mid-game, but they’re also worth points at the end of a round. The kicker? The little thing which makes you want to play this game instead of another? The loser of a trick gets to claim a gold card from the market row matching the value of their losing card. Pretty devious, right?

The Miller Process

The Miller Process is used in gold refining to help it get as close as possible to 100% pure. I might sound smart knowing that, but in truth I looked it up just for a catchy heading for this section of the review. I wanted to emphasise how Aurum really feels like a distillation of the genre, a purified trick-taker. There have been so many variations on a theme that it feels almost fresh to prune the game back and to keep it feeling like a hundred-year-old traditional game.

It’s worth knowing that there are two versions of the game in the box. The three- and four-player games follow the same basic rules but differ slightly as the four-player is two teams of two playing as partners. Your bid is shared, so there’s some tactical play required to try to make sure you meet that bid. If you do manage to win exactly the same number of tricks as your bid, you get double that amount in points. Going over nets you your bid, but go under the bid and it’s a big fat goose egg for you – 0.

Balancing the number of tricks you’ve won against the number of gold cards you’ve got is the trick (pardon the pun). 0-value golds are worth nothing at the end of a round, but 7-8 cards are worth three points each. I’ve seen rounds comprehensively won when a player completely abandoned their bid and mopped up a stack of gold cards instead. There isn’t too much to keep track of in Aurum, but there’s plenty to keep your brain occupied.

Final thoughts

Aurum is my favourite card game at the moment. I love how simple the game is to play and to explain. It takes a couple of tricks for new players to understand why you want to lose some tricks, and more importantly, how to lose well. Anyone can lose, but losing and taking a 6-value gold at the same time? That’s the good stuff, right there. If you don’t like trick-taking games, there’s nothing here which is going to make you change your mind, but that’s one of its strengths. It’s unashamedly a trick-taking game with no gimmicks.

I’m a little bit in love with the artwork in Aurum. There isn’t much, of course, it’s a card game, but the illustrations are gorgeous. The hands depicted on each card have a different pose according to the suit’s element, and I really like the art nouveau meets tarot aesthetic used throughout. Making a card game look unique and not lose the instant legibility you need from it is a skill I really appreciate.

When Aurum releases in the near future here in the UK, you should be able to pick it up for £20 or less. Should you though, that’s the question. If you’re after a card game that’s a bit different to others in your collection, yes, it’s a great game. If you like trick-taking games especially, then it’s a must-buy as far as I’m concerned. The bidding, the winning-by-losing, and the quick, snappy games make it a total winner in my opinion.

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

Aurum (2023)

Design: Shreesh Bhat
Publisher: Pandasaurus Games
Art: Stevo Torres
Players: 3-4
Playing time: 30-45 mins

The post Aurum Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Trick-taking hit the headlines last year with the release of The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine from Kosmos Games. It’s a fantastic co-op trick-taking card game, where players try to work together without communicating, to accomplish missions. That’s great, but what if you want something that isn’t completely co-operative? What if you like a bit of teamwork laced with competition, and enjoy nothing more than crushing your rivals underfoot? Well, a new Kickstarter, Tome: The Light Edition, from Reversal Games, might be exactly what you’re looking for.

Trick shot

Trick-taking is a mechanism that’s been around for longer than I have – which is quite a while. If your parents or grandparents played card games, there’s a good chance they know at least one variation of a trick-taking game. Bridge, Whist & Euchre are among the best-known games.

The principle is simple. A card is played, players try to follow the suit or colour, the highest card in that suit wins that round, or ‘trick’. Tome is the latest to join the ranks of games built on this simple principle. What makes it different though? Why would you enjoy it?

Bridging a gap

Tome is a game in the vein of that perennial favourite, Bridge. Players work in teams of two, with partners sat opposite one another around a table. It follows the tried-and-tested formula of a card being dealt to the middle, and players trying to telepathically communicate with their partner as to which cards they should or shouldn’t play.

Tome’s cards use suits and ranks like many other cards, but the big difference here are the powers imbued in each card. As long as you don’t break the chain of suits from the start of the trick (or Chapter as it’s known, in Tome’s parlance), most of the cards have a power, spell, or effect that’s applied. And let me tell you, these powers really mix things up. You might play a card that increases in value with subsequent cards being played, or one that lets you claim any of the played cards at the end of the chapter. There’s another one that removes the lead card altogether!

It adds a whole new layer to simple trick-taking. Weak cards can suddenly become really powerful, chapters can completely swing on the last card played. And you know what? It feels brilliant when it happens.

Fun on the cards

Tome: The Light Edition is awesome fun. We were able to pick it up really quickly, and after we’d played the first couple of hands, there was this collective whirring of cranial cogs as it all made sense. It’s got a really enjoyable take-that feeling, which never gets outright aggressive or nasty, but is enormously satisfying. Tricks swing suddenly, that four point lead you had is eroded to nothing over the space of five minutes, and I guarantee that at least once in every game you’ll be hanging onto a card, inwardly wringing your hands at a deliciously evil plan you’ve got in store with it.

If even just working as a partnership is too much like co-operation for you, there’s a great Survival mode in the rule book. Three or four players can duke it out, hoping to hang on to at least one of their two lives, to survive long enough to be crowned the winner.

Honestly, it would be really hard for me to come up with a reason for you not to back Tome: The Light Edition. For £11 ($15), it’s an absolute no-brainer. It’s enormous fun, extremely easy to pick-up, will work in combination with other Tome editions as and when they’re available, it’s fast, and it’ll fit in your pocket. The cards, even in the prototype copy I was given, are really nice stock with a great finish. The artwork is gorgeous and practical. It’s as if Magic: The Gathering had a baby with a Tarot deck.

You can back Tome: The Light edition on Kickstarter right now – click here to find out more.

Prototype copy kindly provided by Reversal Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Tome: The Light Edition (2021)

Designer: Anthony Thorp
Publisher: Reversal Games
Art: Lauren Yu
Players: 3-4
Playing time: 30 minutes

The post Tome: The Light Edition Preview appeared first on Punchboard.