7 Wonders

Plays: 6Px1.

7 Wonders is one of the big hits of 2010, selling out its first printing quickly and rising to the top 20 at www.boardgamegeek.com like a rocket. The game is so popular that there isn't much about it that hasn't already been written somewhere else. So, I shall try to be brief.

The Game

7 Wonders is a card game with a civilisation theme. It is divided into 3 ages, and in each age everyone draws 7 cards, picks 1, and passes the rest to a neighbour. You pick 1 card from what you receive from your neighbour, and repeat the process until you have claimed 6 cards this age.

Cards can be buildings that you build, or they can be used to build 1 of the 3 stages of your wonder, or they can be discarded to earn money. Buildings give various benefits, e.g. producing resources, giving military strength, contributing to science, allowing you to build other buildings for free (some buildings require resources to be built). The many different buildings help you build your civilisation. They are your civilisation. Ultimately, they help you score points, some directly, some not.

The cards are beautifully illustrated. Mostly icons are used and not text.

In essence it's a game of choosing cards. You manage the direction of your civilisation as you make these choices. You manage money and resources.

One design objective of the game is to allow 7 people to play within a short time. This is achieved by having everyone pick cards simultaneously. Also you only directly interact with your neighbours, e.g. comparing military superiority, trading.

The Play

I played a 6-player game with mostly newbies at Old Town Kopitiam Cheras. It took 45 minutes including rules explanation. The game indeed moved very fast. Pick a card and pass the rest. How long can that take?

Military is a funny aspect. It's a game of neighbour-envy. Once someone starts developing military, his neighbours will feel the pressure to do the same. Once they too do that, their next neighbours will feel the pressure too. Domino effect. Jimmy sat between Jeff and I, and once Jeff started developing military, an arms race began.

Watching what others are doing is important. You should deny your opponents good cards, not just the immediate neighbours but also opponents further away.

My wonder was the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Each stage of the wonder required different resources to build and provided some benefits. When we played, everyone who had picked his card put it on his wonder board, and once everyone had done so, we turned over our selected cards simultaneously and built / used it.

Henry and Allen.

The game does take up quite a bit of space, but I think it is the right decision to make the cards big, because it will be easier to see what neighbours further away are doing.

Henry made an indecent amount of money, partly helped by Allen who bought a lot of stuff from him. Henry depleted the gold ($3) coins from the supply, and his stack of coins was as impressive as the Tower of Babel. He eventually won the game. I was happy to come second. I produced many resources which let me build some high-scoring buildings. Military also scored me some points.

I need to thank Kareem for bringing and teaching the game. I have been wanting to try 7 Wonders for a long time.

My civilisation at game end. I had completed my wonder (see those three Age I, II and II cards underneath). The red and grey numbered tokens on my board are military tokens. You earn 1, 3, 5pts for being stronger than your neighbours in Ages I to III, and lose -1pts for being weaker. I was stronger than one neighbour and tied with the other in Age I; stronger than both in Age II; and stronger than one but weaker than the other in Age III.

The Thoughts

I like it enough to pre-order it. I don't often have big groups, but the game is supposed to be best with 3 or 4 (and I often have 3-player sessions) and also I'm hoping the 2-player variant will work well with my wife and I.

7 Wonders has a constant flow of decisions. There is luck in how the cards come up, e.g. bad luck if two cards you want badly are in the same group because you can only pick one. However you have interesting decisions to make most of the time. You need to decide between picking a card good for yourself or picking a card for the sake of denying an opponent. You need to decide which strategy to pursue when two (or more!) are presented to you.

Despite the simplicity, I feel the game has strong theme - managing resources, the military arms race, the unique wonders, the tech tree aspect of some cards making other cards free. There are many different aspects to growing a civilisation, and many of them are represented in this game, despite some being in a fairly abstract way.

This is an adjustable-depth game. You can decide to play it with minimal thinking, just focusing on what cards you want to collect. You can do in-depth analysis, trying to guess each player's intentions, checking everyone's cards to count what are still in circulation. Also, this game satisfies the card combo itch. You try to collect cards that work well with your wonder and with your chosen strategy, or you switch strategy to make your cards work. It's all about collecting a set of coherent cards.