This is a game I am very excited to talk about. Restoration is a game
from Vietnam, designed by Plum Tran and Toan Nguyen, and published under Ngu
Hanh Games. It is a strategy game about restoration of the Kien Trung Palace.
You play the role of artists and craftsmen. This is a worker placement game.
It uses a rondel mechanism, and it has area majority competition.
This is how a game is set up. You play three rounds, each round representing a
period of two years. The three rounds are randomised and what you can do will
be different depending on the round cards in play. You can see in the photo
above that the round cards for 2021-2022 and 2023-2024 are still face-down.
The one for 2019-2020 is revealed, dictating that rondel actions will move 2
steps, and you can play at most 1 manager card on your turn.
This is your player board. You start with three workers in your colour and one
neutral worker. Most of the time you place workers on the main board. However
you have a placement spot on your player board too, and a mini rondel (where
that big cube is). The section at the bottom right is for end-game scoring.
Whenever you complete restoring a section of the palace, you get to claim one
small cube. You place your cube in any of the five columns here to score
end-game bonuses. Each column specifies a criteria you have to meet. For
example the first column says you score 1 point per worker. Cubes you place
here are a multiplier.
Five interconnected board pieces form the main board, and together they form
six squares where you can place workers. Each board piece has a rondel - a
circuit of icons. When you place a worker, you get to move the cubes on either
board piece next to your worker. Each step a cube advances lets you do
something. Mostly it is doing restoration work.
These large tiles are where the restoration work is done. Each tile represents
a section of the palace. To work on restoring a section, you have to place a
worker on the main board to advance a rondel cube, and that cube needs to
advance to an icon which matches the next step here. You also need to commit a
worker here to be used as a progress marker. This is quite challenging because
you will have one worker fewer to work with. Technically you can work on two
sections at the same time, but this means you are tying up two workers. When
you complete a section, you claim the tile and your worker can rest. To ask
him to come back to work, you will lose reputation. Reputation is like money
in this game. You need to make sure you have enough to get people to continue
working.
This is the side board. The central section is the development area. You have
a pawn here. Whenever you advance, you gain a benefit. One important benefit
is unlocking an extra worker at step 3 and 7. More workers means more things
getting done. The track on the right is for your reputation. I think of it as
money.
These are manager cards. They have all sorts of abilities. All of them have
one basic ability, which is to advance the rondel cube one step. This is shown
at the bottom right of every card.
After you complete restoring a section of the palace, you claim the section
tile. At the back you can read about that section of the palace.
One important aspect of the game is collaborative construction. When you place
a worker on a spot which already has other workers, after you perform your
action, everyone else present here gets to perform a small action too - moving
one adjacent rondel cube one step. In the game I played, some of us actively
collaborated, and we got a lot of work done collectively. I heard that in
another game, people played in a cutthroat manner and did their best to avoid
helping others. I find this intriguing.
This is where neutral workers have an impact. You should place workers in your
own colour early, so that you can benefit from others placing workers here
later, or even yourself placing more workers here. Neutral workers don't enjoy
the collaborative construction bonus.
Restoration has several moving parts, but they gel together well. I
want to say it is a heavy strategy game, but it is not too heavy. I shall call
it medium-heavy. There is a constant puzzle of how to perform restoration
efficiently. Depending on the rondel situation on the main board, you may
choose a different section to start restoring. If the next few steps on those
five rondels show many red spaces, you probably want to start work on a palace
section with many red spaces. It will make life easier for you. If you know
your opponents need spaces of a specific colour to advance their restoration
work, you can be a meanie and move the rondels past those colours. Oh you
horrible person!
You can actually compete on the same palace sections. This did not happen in
the first 80% of our game, because we didn't want to take the risk and waste
our efforts. However towards game end we did compete. Each palace tile is a
race track. If two or more players work on the same tile, only the first to
complete it claims the tile. This game can be rather cutthroat.
There are opportunities to make big combos, and this is always fun. When you
advance on the palace sections, some spaces give you bonuses. These bonuses
can trigger chain reactions and help you further advance.
In the game I played, I arbitrarily decided to go for the workers end-game
bonus. That meant I wanted to unlock all my workers, and also in the last
round I wanted to be able to win as many neutral workers as possible. Whenever
I completed a palace section, I placed the bonus cube here. When you can see
that your opponents are trying to work on specific scoring conditions, you
should try to deny them.
The area majority competition in the game comes into play at the end of a
round. Notice that the worker placement squares have yellow dots. These are
the strengths of each worker there. For each of the five board pieces, you
compare who has the highest strength. He gets the right to recruit a neutral
worker for the next round. He needs to pay reputation to recruit. It's not
free.
This was my play area at the end of our game. I restored many sections of the
palace. Together we completed the restoration early in Round 3. Something felt
off. It seemed too easy. Later we found out that we had played one important
rule wrong. When you do collaborative construction, the bonus is only one
step. We had played that you get the same number of steps as dictated by the
round card. On many turns we moved twice instead of once. No wonder our
restoration progressed so quickly. Oops. Still, we had fun with the game and
it was very satisfying.
This is a game for the more serious gamers, not casual gamers. It is not a
typical Asian game. Asian games tend to be light and they target the casual
crowd. We do have heavy gamers in Asia, but it is a small niche. I hope
Restoration does well internationally. This is a breakthrough. We can
have heavy strategy games from Asia too!
The designers Plum Tran and Toan Nguyen
Here's an interview of Plum about her
journey as an indie publisher in Vietnam. The English version is in the second half of the page.
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