I played it once solo to learn the rules, then played it once with Pallas and once today with Michelle. Both of them liked it, and I really like it too. It's got a beautiful board with some beautiful components, and it's a worker placement game with some different takes on the whole worker mechanic, so it's pretty much exactly what I look for in a game.
It's pretty simple really. Six rounds, broken into two main phases. First phase you draft some cards- either you send a certain number of workers (you have a bunch) to one of three resource areas in exchange for a certain number of resource cubes, or you pay some gold to buy another craftsperson which you take into your hand. Maximum hand number of these crafters is five. They are what convert your resources into victory points later on.
The second phase is where it gets interesting- each player has a number of master workers in a bag, and each worker is drawn blind from the bag one by one. The first worker drawn has the option to either pay 7 gold (a lot) to place their worker on the board, or pass. Either way the next worker drawn from the bag, even if it's the same colour as the previously drawn one, has the same opportunity, only this time it only costs 6 gold. This goes all the way down and if everyone passes, then all workers still left can be placed for free in the order they were first drawn. This is quite unique to my experience and a lot of fun as it makes for some hard and interesting decisions.
The board has a bunch of places that offer differing benefits, as in all worker placements. The trick is to pick the one that gets you the most points, and of course your opponents are blocking you and forcing you to think fast to change tactics. After each round another piece of the cathedral is placed, and at the end of the game you have a cool little wooden cathedral in the middle of the board.
This game isn't super new, and I described it to Pallas as "it's like they heard about worker placement games and only had a vague idea of what those are and designed a cool game based on their conceptions." Which I totally dig. It does stuff I haven't seen in other wp games. It's fun! But if I'm honest I was a little disappointed that the big wooden cathedral, the biggest hook in the game, is really just a glorified round tracker. After each round you add a piece. That's it. And the thing is, there are three other round trackers built into the game already- the craftsperson cards, the favour cards and the event cards all double as ways to keep track of the rounds.
This has the unfortunate effect of turning the big wooden pieces into a gimmick. I really hate to say that, because this is a really fun game! I thought players would maybe work together to gather the necessary resources to build each piece, with maybe points for the player who contributes the most or penalties to those who don't, as in the constructed markets in Euphoria (the game I discussed in the previous post). I almost thought about designing my own variant where this is what you do, but that is a little ambitious and beyond my skills, so I didn't. I wonder if anyone has?
The other day on Twitter someone started a good discussion by calling out some prominent board game YouTubers who had taken it upon themselves to "fix" Elizabeth Hargrave's new game Mariposas. Which I have and have played twice now. I really like it. You play a bunch of Monarch butterflies who have to migrate from Michoacan up to Canada and back, picking up resources and card sets along the way. It's really hard- collecting sets to get points is not always possible while also meeting the other goals and requirements of the game. So RandomDude decided to make a rule where something something something. I dunno. He made it easier anyways.
So, on the one hand, if you buy a game, you have every right to house rule and do whatever you want with it. You bought it. Bonk each other on the head with the board and smash each other in the face with the box for all I care.
On the other hand, doing this with your platform of thousands and implying you know better than the designer is a little ... I can see where this raises eyebrows. Especially when Elizabeth Hargrave, award-winning designer of the massively huge game Wingspan, has had to face all kinds of misogynistic passive aggressiveness and aggressive aggressiveness just for being a woman in the board game design world.
And again, if RandomDude was just saying "this is too hard so I made it easier for me lol lol I'm terrible at games" I would be the first one to give a thumbsup emoji. You do you! Have fun! But this RandomDude (who is not just some random dude at all but one of the biggest BG personalities) has a history of blundering into these sorts of gendered "controversies" (for want of a better term, these are hardly scandals on the scale of separating children from their parents in ICE concentration camps) and claiming innocent ignorance. "Oh I didn't realize I was being a dick! Teach me better I want to learn!!" I'm less inclined lately to pardon ignorance when your google bar is just right over there.
But I do wish we were actively building the cathedral in Pillars of the Earth.
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