Rising Sun

Plays: 3Px1.

The Game

Rising Sun is brought to you by the same team as Blood Rage. The designer is Eric Lang. It is a Euro-style conflict game with low granularity. The first similarity between these two games you will notice is how amazing the sculptures are:

The backdrop is a mythical Japan, with gods and monsters. You are great clans competing for supremacy. You play through three seasons, scoring victory points by winning battles and various other means. Whoever scores the highest after three seasons wins the game.

There are only 8 provinces on the map. The structure of the game is 3 seasons, each consisting of 7 rounds - only 21 rounds in total. Every round an active player draws 4 action tiles, picks one to execute and return the rest to the deck. Every player gets to perform the selected action, and the active player and his ally also gain a small bonus. This is a little like Puerto Rico. The active player, having seen those three tiles returned to the deck, knows 3 of the 4 options the next player will have, and can strategise accordingly. The actions you get to execute are mainly for positioning your fighters for the battles which will occur at the end of a season. Actions include raising troops, moving troops, levying taxes and triggering betrayals. The number of battles to be fought at the end of a season depends on the number of players. The provinces to be fought over are randomly determined before a season starts, so you can plan where to fight. The winner of each battle gains a war province token, which is worth points. At game end, you also score points based on how many tokens of different provinces you own. This means you are encouraged to fight in different provinces and not turtle in one or two.

The large tiles in the first row are the gods. When the raise troops action is being performed, you may train monks and assign them to pray to these gods. At 3 junctures during a season, after the 3rd, 5th and 7th rounds, god powers are triggered. For each god, only the clan with the most monks get to use the god power. God powers include moving troops, gaining mercenaries and gaining honour. Honour is the tiebreaker for all situations.

The second row is the procedures of a full season. The large boxes are for placing action tiles. Two tiles have been placed, which means two rounds have been played. That character after the 3rd, 5th and 7th rounds is the character for "god". That's when god powers are triggered. The red bordered box at the end means war time. The yin-yang icon at the start means alliances. At the start of a season there is a free negotiation session for forming alliances. An alliance must have exactly two members. The main benefit of alliances is you get to enjoy the bonus too when it is your ally's turn to pick an action. During battle, allies don't merge their armies. Only one clan can win a province. In the photo above, Allen (blue) and I (green) have formed an alliance. You can see on the far right that our alliance tokens form a complete yin-yang circle. With only three players, Han (red) is left without any ally.

Player unit sculptures are unique for each clan. I play the green clan. The leftmost is my monk. The middle two are both soldiers. Different sculptures but same function. The rightmost is my castle. One unique ability of the green clan is castles may move, thus those giant turtles. This is the mythical feudal era version of Howl's Moving Castle.

This is the player screen. It lists the unique abilities of your clan and also show your starting province. That table at the bottom right shows how many victory points you score depending how many different provinces you collected war province tokens for. Below this screen are the coins used in the game, which are beautiful.

One of the actions in the game lets you buy special abilities cards like these, which augment your clan. Some give you monsters, and the monsters all have unique abilities. Some give you money. These two give an extra soldier whenever you raise troops. I had two of these, which meant getting two extra soldiers every time the raise troops action was taken. I was going for quantity.

This reference card is double-sided. This side shows the procedures of a battle. Before a battle starts, participants bid any numbers of coins on the four big boxes here. If you win a bid, you get to use the ability written in the box. The first step is seppuku (ritual suicide). You ask your fighters to kill themselves even before battle starts, and earn 1 victory point and 1 honour per suicide. If you don't think you will win anyway, this is actually not as stupid an idea as it sounds. The second step is taking one hostage and stealing one victory point from an opponent. This doesn't sound like much, but sometimes the difference of one unit can change the outcome of a battle. The third step is winning the rights to deploy mercenaries. Mercenaries can completely change the course of a battle, but of course you need to have recruited some in the first place. The fourth step is the battle itself, which is a simple comparison of numbers. Losers all die, winners all live. The final step is earning 1 victory point per fighter killed in battle. Despite the battle step itself being simple, bidding for and winning the rights to the other four steps can greatly affect the outcome of the battle and how many victory points you earn.

The token at the bottom left is a mercenary token. These are ronin, or masterless samurai. The token at the bottom right is a war province token. This is from the first season, the spring season, and is worth 1 victory point.

Overall you can think of Rising Sun as a victory point scoring game. The story unfolds through the manoeuvring in the 7 rounds of each season, culminating in the end-of-season battles. Winning these battles and claiming war province tokens are a big part of scoring, but there are many other ways to score points too. During the battle themselves you can score points. In the normal rounds it is also possible to score points when you levy taxes.

The Play

I did a 3-player game with Allen and Han, and we were all new to the game.

This was early in the game, and our forces were still mostly in our starting provinces. My green clan started in the Kyoto province at the centre of Honshu. Han's red clan started in the Edo province, to my east. Allen's blue clan started in the Hokkaido province in the far north. Han was first to go. Since there were only 7 actions per season, as first player he would be picking 3 actions this season, while Allen and I would only be picking 2 each. Han opened the offer for alliance, pointing out that his ally would enjoy more bonuses. However this only made Allen and I more wary, and we ended up allying with each other, agreeing to join forces to subdue Han.

As the spring season came to a close, things didn't look good for Allen and I. So much for ganging up on Han. Han's forces (red) had spread out to many provinces. One thing that he used effectively was the Betrayal action. He could convert an opponent's unit to his own. Later during the game, Han's clan unique ability also proved very powerful. For his clan, money and mercenaries were interchangeable. He had a strong economy, and could easily win the bid for deploying mercenaries. He would then spend more money as mercenaries, allowing him to win the battle. Money talks! Han had an amazing spring season, winning many provinces and sprinting far ahead of Allen and I.

In the summer season, it was even more important for Allen and I to work together. We became allies again. Han was too strong! Most war provinces in the second season overlapped with those in the first, so there was less incentive for Han to win them. It was more important for him to deny us than to win those provinces for himself. In summer, Allen (blue) and I (green) were better able to march our forces to other provinces.

Each province has a hexagon next to it. The symbols in the hexagon are what you gain when you levy taxes. When the levy tax action is chosen, the clan which has the strongest presence in a province levies taxes. So positioning your troops is not only for the end-of-season battles. Levying taxes during the normal rounds can be very lucrative. E.g. for the Kyoto province (green), you earn 4 victory points when you levy taxes.

The black-and-white lines are shipping routes which connect provinces. Province interconnectivity is high. You can move from any province to any other province within 3 steps.

This was autumn, the third and last season. Han (red) was still far ahead. Allen's (blue) and my (green) alliance was not effective in reining him in at all. Come autumn, Allen decided to abandon me, and took up Han's alliance offer. At the time my score on the score track was near Han's, but Allen's was still near zero. Reaching out to Allen was the best move for Han, because he wanted to make sure the second place (me) would not threaten him. Allen knew it was impossible to win, so he changed his goal - he just wanted to not come last. I did look like I wasn't doing too poorly, but it was an illusion. The points for collecting different war province tokens were not calculated yet, and I was far behind Han in this.

The war provinces in autumn turned out to be completely overlapping those in spring and summer. For Han, who had already collected all possible colours, it was less about collecting more, and more about preventing us from collecting more. In this photo you can easily tell which provinces would have battles. We completely ignored the other provinces.

This was the fifth and last battle for the autumn season. I (green) did have many fighters, but this was no guarantee for victory. Han had a presence, and being flush with cash, he might still win the bid for mercenaries and then deploy enough mercenaries to win. Despite the actual fighting being a simple comparison of numbers, the bidding mechanism often makes the battle outcomes uncertain and exciting. A correct reading of your opponent's intentions can turn a seemingly hopeless situation into a victory.

In the end, I fell from second place to last. Han secured his victory without breaking a sweat. Allen made great advances in autumn and overtook me comfortably. Both of us were still far far behind Han.

The Thoughts

Rising Sun has lavish production and is a very Euro-style multiplayer conflict game. It has low granularity. It has high player interaction. Your end goal is to score points, so you should not fight for the sake of fighting. It's not a hot-blooded battle game. It's more the cold, calculative, bean-counting type. Many mechanisms are deterministic. Much information is open - the gods available, the special ability cards available, where battles will occur. It's all laid out and you can strategise and plan accordingly. It actually feels a little like chess. Everyone has the same information. It is the secret bidding which throws a wrench in the works. This is where you become psychological. There's some double guessing and risk assessment. There is some luck in whether you guess your opponent's intentions right. The order of action tiles coming up is also a random factor and a luck factor. That is somewhat mitigated since you do have 4 options.

Kingdomino

Plays: 3Px1.

The Game

Kingdomino is the 2017 Spiel des Jahres winner, designed by Bruno Cathala (Abyss, Cyclades, Five Tribes, Mr Jack). It's a family game and a light strategy game. You build your own little kingdom using domino-like tiles. These are rectangular tiles consisting of two squares. Each square has a terrain type, and possibly one or more crowns. You have an imaginary 5x5 grid in which to build your kingdom. Every round you add a tile to your kingdom. Once the tiles run out, you score your kingdom, and whoever has the highest score wins.

Everyone starts his kingdom with a 1x1 castle. You grow your kingdom outwards from here. Whenever you add a tile to your kingdom, at least one square must touch an existing square of the same terrain type, just like playing dominoes. E.g. a wheatfield square on the new tile matches up with an existing wheatfield. If you are unable to match either square of the new tile with an existing square, you will be forced to discard the new tile. The only exception in terrain matching is the castle. Any terrain matches the castle.

You may choose not to place a tile even if it there is a legal placement. Sometimes this can be beneficial, but this is rare. Discarding a tile is usually involuntary.

You score points for each connected group of terrain squares. The value of a terrain group is the size of the group multiplied by the number of crowns on it. In the photo above, the large wheatfield group is worth 6VP. Size of 6 x 1 crown = 6VP. There are two tiny minefield groups, and currently one is worth 1VP (because of the 1 crown), the other is worth nothing. If these two minefield groups can later be linked up, they will be worth more. You want to build big terrain groups, and you want to have as many crowns as possible in them, especially the bigger groups.

One important restriction is the build area of 5x5. You must never exceed 5 rows or 5 columns. You may expand out from your castle in any direction. The castle need not be fixed as the centre of your kingdom. However if you are able to make it the centre, you earn a 10VP bonus at game end. Also if you manage to place all 12 tiles claimed during the game, making a complete 5x5 kingdom with no holes, you score a 5VP bonus.

How you claim tiles is the interesting part of the game. At the start of the game, you draw a number of tiles equal to the number of players. Every tile has a number on its back, which is indicative of its value. Terrains have different rarities and different numbers of crowns, so in general some are more valuable than others. The tiles are arranged in order of their numbers. Players then take turn claiming one each by placing their pawns. If you claim the lowest numbered tile (which is roughly the least valuable tile), you will have first pick next round. If you claim the highest numbered tile, you will pick last next round. That means you'll take whatever others leave behind. This mechanism of picking both the tile and the turn order for next round is the key element in Kingdomino.

You are constantly assessing the values of the tiles both to yourself and to your opponents. You need to watch their kingdoms to know what they want. Decision-making is based not only on what you want, but also on how desperately you need to deny your opponents. The value of a tile is certainly not simply based on its number. It is much more dependent on the board situation at each kingdom.

In the photo above, the column on the right are the tiles being claimed in the current round. One of them has been taken and the player is now adding it to his kingdom, so the tile is gone. After placing the tile, this active player will pick a tile from the left column to be claimed in the next round.

The game is played over 12 rounds only. Some tiles are randomly removed during setup depending on the number of players, so once the draw pile is exhausted, everyone will have claimed 12 tiles, and the game ends.

The Play

Kingdomino plays very quickly. It's a family game, but it almost feels more like a children's game. The rules and mechanisms are simple, but there is some strategy. You do need to think ahead a little how to build your perfect little kingdom. There's the invisible 5x5 boundary you need to consider. You need to keep your options open for future rounds. The bonuses for having a perfectly centred castle and for having a complete 5x5 kingdom are not easy to achieve. Both require forward planning. I may be making this sound complicated and thinky, but in practice, everything is clean and clear, and the game progresses briskly.

Building your own kingdom is solitaire play. The player interaction is in drafting tiles and fighting for turn order. There is no aggressive player interaction, only the passive aggressive type where you claim a tile which your opponent would have wanted.

The game feels like a puzzle - how do you build your kingdom and maximise your score? How do you try to fit everything in to fulfill all the scoring criteria?

The Thoughts

Kingdomino reminds me of Santiago, because the connected area scoring is similar. Santiago is a mid-weight strategy game. Kingdomino is much lighter. It is brisk and pleasant, and can be done in 20 minutes. Ivan said he is able to play with his young daughter. The only bit she needs some help with is the multiplication. Normally I am less interested in short games because they tend to be less satisfying. In the case of Kingdomino the challenge in building that perfect little kingdom is enticing me to play again.

The Quest for El Dorado

Plays: 3Px1.

The Game

Reiner Knizia doing a deck-building game! This game caught my attention well before it was nominated for the Spiel des Jahres (it didn't win eventually). This is a race game in which you use your deck of cards to advance your pawn on the race track. The race track is customisable. You can use the recommended setups or make your own. Everyone has the same starting deck of cards, and a hand size of four. During the game you improve your deck, adding and also possibly removing cards, hoping to speed you up towards your destination. Whoever reaches El Dorado first wins.

The map consists of hex spaces. Each hex indicates the resources required for your pawn to enter. Yellow hexes require coins, green hexes require machetes, blue hexes require paddles. They represent villages, jungles and rivers. When you play a card, you expend the resources on it to move your pawn onto a new hex, or along a few hexes requiring that resource type. Mountains are impassable. Grey hexes require discarding cards.

This is one of the setups recommended by the rulebook. The starting line is at the bottom right. El Dorado is at the other end.

You start a turn with a hand size of four. You may play cards to move your pawn. Then you may play cards to buy one new card (which is put into your personal discard pile). Eventually you draw back up to four cards. You may discard unwanted cards before refilling your hand. If a card you play has more than one resource, you may use it to move your pawn multiple hexes, as long as the number of resources is sufficient to pay for every hex. However if a particular hex requires multiple resources, you are not allowed to pool together a few cards to move your pawn onto that hex. You need a single card with at least that many resources. If you don't have that, you need to take another route.

When buying a card, coin cards count according to their card values. Other cards can be used, but they only count as half a coin each. In the worst case, if you don't have any coin cards, your four cards can still add up to 2 coins.

The strip at the top left is the card market. Normally you may only buy cards here. The game starts with a predetermined set of 6 types of cards. There are only three cards per type. Once all three are bought, a space is opened up. At that point, you are allowed to buy any card outside of the market. If you do so, you will be buying the first of three cards. You move the other two into the market, thus filling in the blank. The market is now full again, and the restriction of buying only from the market applies again.

The price of a card is written at the bottom. Green, blue and yellow cards have machetes, paddles and coins respectively. White cards are jokers. Purple cards give special abilities. Some cards can only be used once, after which they are permanently removed from the game.

This is a deck-building game, and most of the standard rules apply. When you buy a new card, it goes to your discard pile. You reshuffle your cards only when your draw deck is exhausted. That means a new card will only come into play after the next reshuffle. You can thin your deck. The remove action removes a card from play, i.e. the card is set aside and not put in your discard pile. The next time you reshuffle, it won't come back. Removing weak cards makes your deck more efficient.

The start cards are all value 1 cards.

I'm rich, rich, rich! This hand looks good, but may not be all that great. Yes, I can afford expensive cards, but I may only buy one per turn anyway, so this is overkill. Most of the time, on your turn you try to make use of every card, be it to move or to buy a card, because you always draw back up to four anyway.

Some mountain hexes have caves. This is a variant, which we used in our game. When you approach a cave hex, you gain a random single-use special ability token. Their powers vary, and they can be quite handy. They give good flexibility because you can keep them till the ideal moment to use them. They are fun because everybody likes lucky draws.

So, on your turn you may move, and you may buy one new card. While you race towards El Dorado, you are tuning your deck to be able to race more effectively. Your deck is your tool. Your goal is to be first to cross the finish line. Positioning on the board is important, because blocking applies. You may not enter an occupied hex, and you may not pass through such a hex either. Trailing behind others is usually bad because they'll all be in your way. Blocking is something you need to defend yourself from, and you need to use it against your opponents too.

The Play

Ivan taught Allen and I to play. I have a bad habit when playing deck-building games. When I play Star Realms, I often enjoying building that perfect deck, that I lose sight of my true objective. I like to buy red cards which let me trim away the weak starting cards. I like to focus on buying cards of just one or two colours, so that there will be more synergies. In themselves, these actions are fine and they are valid tactics. My problem is I lose sight of the goal of killing my opponent. I don't get enough combat strength quickly enough to defeat my opponent. What use is my perfect deck when I'm close to being exterminated? When playing The Quest for El Dorado, I made the same mistake. Up front I decided I was going to focus on coin cards, which would help me buy more cards. There was a good variety of cards in the game, and many looked awfully powerful. I enjoyed collecting them and making use of them. I did have some "Ladies and gentlemen... " moments, when I made fantastic moves. However, I was too lax in pushing my pawn on the board. Ivan was the leading player throughout most of the race, and I was trailing most of the time. I kept thinking once I made my perfect deck, I would pull a come-from-behind victory. I did have the strongest buying power. I bought many coin cards. I was rich rich rich! Unfortunately rich rich rich did not automatically mean win win win. What was more important was being efficient in achieving the goal. Spending too much time on deck-building was actually bad, especially since I did it at the expense of not paying enough attention to the board.

Another lesson I learned was the need to plan ahead very specifically. There was one particular stretch of river on the board which I had underestimated and did not plan for. It was four consecutive spaces of water which was part of the shortest path to El Dorado. Each space needed just one paddle, but paddle cards were rarer, and that made a stretch of four a challenge. I didn't want to buy many paddle cards, and decided I'd just take a longer path, expecting my strong deck to help me to advance quickly enough. Both Ivan and Allen strategised to make use of this stretch. They were able to cross the whole stretch within one turn, by playing a value-4 joker card. This is the kind of efficiency we are talking about!

I also learned the importance of blocking. The leading player commanded a big advantage, because he would normally be trying to take the easiest path, and that meant he would be blocking the next players from also taking that easiest path.

There are things you can strategise, but at the same time the game is very tactical. What you can do depends on what you draw. There's a tension of whether you'll be drawing the right cards at the right time. There's the fun puzzle of how to make the most of your hand of cards, given your current position on the board. A turn is usually fast, because you can only do what your cards allow you to do. You can temporarily forget about everything else.

El Dorado is at the upper left. Now the three pawns are about to enter the board section in the middle. If you trace the shortest path to El Dorado, you can see a hex in the middle requiring 4 coins. This can be a pivotal point. There aren't many cards with 4 coins or cards that allow you to enter such a space. If you have such a card, and also happen to have it in hand when you approach this hex, you will be able to take the shortest path. Otherwise you will be forced to take a detour, costing you precious turns.

As we played, the card pool dwindled to a point which surprised me. Many card types were exhausted. I wonder whether it was because we (especially me) had been buying aggressively. If it were a full four-player game, there would be even fewer cards left.

The Thoughts

I was not disappointed. The Quest for El Dorado is a quality design. You need to strike a balance between equipping yourself for the race, and running the race itself. There is a lot you can think about and strategise about, yet on your turn the things you can do are often simple and few. You can only do what your hand of cards and your position on the board allow you to do. You can plan ahead, and try to position yourself better for future turns, but what you get to execute now is usually straightforward. The most difficult decision is probably when you get the option to buy any card on the table. Hopefully before you get to that point you have been paying attention and thinking about how you are crafting your deck. You should already have a general idea what your game plan is.

This is a game of flexible depth. You can play it simple mindedly; you can choose to put in a lot of thought. Naturally if you do the latter, your chances of winning are better. Either way you play, the game is enjoyable. It might be a problem though if some players play at one extreme and some at the other. One side would be accused of being brainless, and the other side slow.

I like how the game gives me much freedom to customise my deck. Throughout the game I am always occupied, with many strategic considerations I can delve into. I think about the board situation, the cards in the market, how I am going to adjust my deck, and the strategies my opponents are using. Many of these factors are constantly changing, and I always need to adapt, and do the best with what I draw. Puzzling out what best to do with your hand is satisfying.

Majesty: For the Realm

Plays: 4Px1.

The Game

Majesty is designed by Marc Andre (Splendor, Barony), and you can see his style in this game too - simple actions coming together to make a richer-than-expected strategy game. You feel the game is more than the sum of its parts.

To summarise the game in one sentence - you collect twelve cards to score points. It really does come down to just that. It is amazingly simple. Everyone starts the game with his own kingdom. These kingdoms are identical - the same set of eight buildings. You also have 5 workers (the white meeples).

You have a card row at the centre of the table. This is your sushi belt style card row, like in Through the Ages and Century: Spice Road. On your turn, you pick a character from the card row to add to your kingdom. You place the character below a building matching his profession, and trigger the building power. Usually the benefit you gain is proportional to the number of characters you have at the building, i.e. existing employees plus the new recruit. So you are incentivised to collect many characters of the same profession.

When picking a character from the card row, if you take the first character on the left, it is free. If you choose a character further down the line, you need to pay a worker for every character you skip over. Those workers are placed directly onto the characters you skip. In this photo the first two characters have many workers because they have been unpopular and people have been skipping them. As characters amass more and more workers, they become more attractive. When you take a character with workers on them, you take the accumulated workers as well.

The building powers are all straightforward. When you place a character at the mill, every character at the mill including the new recruit earns $2. When you place a character at the brewery, every character here earns $2 and gains one worker. Then all players with at least one character at the mill earns $2 flat.

Money is victory points. All that money you earn during the game are points. At the end of the game, you do two types of scoring to earn more points - breadth and depth. Breadth refers to how many of your buildings (aside from the infirmary) have characters. The square of that number is your score. If you have characters at all seven of the normal buildings, you get 7 x 7 = 49 points (or $49). Depth refers to having many workers at each building type. For all seven normal building types, you check who has the most characters. The winner or winners gain the point value shown at the bottom right corner of the building card. In the photo above you can see the mill gives you 10pts if you have the most characters here.

That rightmost building is the infirmary. You don't recruit people here. Only injured characters come here. Whenever a player recruits a soldier, he triggers an attack on all other players. Whoever doesn't have enough guards to repel the attack suffers injury - the leftmost character is injured and sent to the infirmary. This means the character is no longer working at the building he was originally assigned, and the building is now weaker. You can heal injured characters by recruiting healers at the cottage. Each time you recruit a healer, one character at the infirmary is healed and returns to work.

The building cards are two sided. The A side powers are simpler, the B side powers are more advanced. You have a variant game right out of the box.

The coins are hefty, much like Splendor.

The draw deck is adjusted based on the number of players. By the time it is exhausted, everyone will have claimed exactly 12 characters. Your job is to make the most of your 12 employees to earn as much money as possible. You not only have to think of the combos you are going to make, you also need to consider what others are trying to do. Some buildings affect others. You need to consider the breadth and depth scoring at game end. You choices are constrained by what cards appear in the card row by the time your turn comes around. You often need to adjust your plan to make the most of what fate deals you.

The Play

I did a four-player game with Jeff, Kareem and Allen. Both Jeff and Kareem had played Majesty before. Allen and I were new. The pace of the game was brisk. Afterall, all you do on your turn is simply pick one card. Sometimes you do need to think a bit before deciding, but most of the time you can already plan and think before your turn comes. Also if you are low on workers, you can't choose far anyway and normally don't need to worry about the cards you can't reach. The card row is constantly changing, so the game can feel quite tactical. You are often responding to the situation and trying to make the best of it.

From what Jeff and Kareem said, the queen strategy seemed to be a strong one, so I decided to try that out. Every queen earned $5, so each time I married a new queen, the dowry increased to $10, $15, $20 etc. The blue character in the middle was a guard, who protected my kingdom from attack. Jeff went the soldier route early, when the rest of us were not well prepared to defend ourselves. Whenever a player attacks, he attacks all other players. If one player attacks early and attacks frequently, it is hard to defend against, because if your number of guards doesn't catch up and match his number of soldiers, every time he attacks, you still get hurt, and he becomes even harder to catch up to. Also if all other players try to defend themselves by recruiting guards, there won't be enough guards to go around.

Refer to the photo above. If I failed to defend against an attack, my mill employee, being the leftmost character, would be injured and would go to the infirmary. My two queens were on the right, so they would be last to get hurt. Usually the characters on the left becomes cannon fodder, shielding other characters in the kingdom.

At this stage I had 4 queens. I wasn't able to defend myself well, and had two injured characters in the infirmary now. I needed healers (characters for the 3rd building) to help them recover and resume their duties.

Some cards are dual character cards. If you claim such a card, you may choose either one of the characters. The second and third cards both had a soldier, so all of us wanted to take them to prevent Jeff from attacking again. It is often expensive to make such a defensive move. You would be preventing a setback but would not be advancing your position. You would be saving others too, but would get no reward. Dual character cards give you an option to use the card for another purpose, which may be helpful to you. You may gain something while averting disaster.

This game has high player interaction. The soldier is the most direct form of player interaction, but it is certainly not the only such element. At game end, everyone compares their characters in every building type. That's area majority competition. You need to watch which buildings your opponents are trying to win. The worst case is coming second in all the buildings you compete in. You earn nothing. You must watch your opponents to understand what they want, and which characters they highly value. Sometimes you must deny them, and ideally you gain something while you do that.

The Thoughts

Majesty plays like a lightweight game but satisfies like a midweight game. 12 moves are all you get, but they entangle you in an intricate network of strategic considerations. It's a serving of lembas bread. It's just a small bite, but it is filling. It is easy to teach so you can play it with casual gamers and non gamers. For old timers, this is no deep strategy game, but it's a clever little gem worth exploring and appreciating.