Renegade Game Studios Renegade Game Studio | Architects of the West Kingdom | Board Game | Ages 12+ | 1 to 5 Players | 60 to 80 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

I sought this game out after having played The Manhattan Project with friends (fun fact – that was the last pre-corona game I played before a drought of many a month. Architects of the West Kingdom is the latest board game in a line of “It's a standard worker placement game, but…” style of design.

This can range from gaining money and other resources to building part of the cathedral or another building. Otherwise, you’ll mostly be using your workers to collect goods and then use them to build cards or build portions of the Cathedral. This board tracks influence, holds the Contribution/Consequence cards, has the iconography for the above bonuses and penalties, as well as space for two more apprentices (10 are now available for hire during the game). If you are too virtuous, you cannot be sneaky and use the black market; on the other hand, if you are non-virtuous, you skip paying taxes because you’re so dastardly. e. the AI score points more easily), but I can’t justify getting an expansion to fix a game that fell flat for me.A third option: you can pay 5x silver (2x of these to Tax) to retrieve your workers trapped on a Player Board. Of course, your opponents can do the same, which makes it an interesting push and pull between attacking them and making your engine efficient yet not attractive to being attacked. But this, and other Apprentices who dabble on the nefarious side of the law, could lose you 1x Virtue. Few games though make you calculate the risk and reward against a pivot point in someone else’s head. I’m slightly disappointed by the chosen card size as it is difficult to find good-fitting sleeves for them currently, but this is only a minor concern for me, and should be no concern at all for people who do not sleeve their cards.

It is nice to have another color option (orange), but I do not play this game with more than four players. You can capture a different group of workers from any (or the same) location, for every additional worker you have at the Town Centre. If any of these coins are red on the board, those are tax, and those coins are placed in the Tax Stand. and it also reduces the loss of virtue you’d normally suffer for some of the less savoury actions on the board.Plus, they can just better their lives at the end of the game and get out of the negative points and maybe even into the positives. Especially since workers don’t leave prison after a reset, you can do multiple triggers with the same crew if you plan ahead. If you can, I would recommend picking up both, especially if you already like Architects of the West Kingdom. Everything else happens so quickly, especially with the acceleration from putting more pieces on the same space, that the additional actions spent don’t feel like they drag the game down. Also, we could either find some two player variants on the internet or turn to a solo game if we don’t have anyone to play with.

The aesthetic, the component design, and the board layout all make it look like it’s going to be a mere variation on a theme. It may not have a lot of fresh ideas, but the biggest fresh idea it does have is like a welcome waft of cool air flowing through a dusty cave. Do you want to take shortcuts by visiting the Black Market, stealing from the Tax Stand, and building valuable but ill-reputed buildings like the Dungeon? A few underhanded deals here and there might not seem like much, but fall too far and you will be punished.The mechanisms are light and the turns are super fast, so in that regard the game and its presence do sync up rather well. Once every resource has been contributed, or a Black Market Rest occurs, all resources on the card are placed on the appropriate Wonder, reducing its cost. It’s why on every serious application you ever use on your computer you’ll find ‘print’ under the ‘file’ menu. I often think of these reviews as lecture notes for a course I will never deliver, so please forgive me my occasional diversion.

Or do you push your luck and keep squeezing more wood and stone out at the risk of making things even harder as the game drags on? That by itself is a fascinating mechanism that effectively decouples your instincts from your best interests. In this way, players can control their opponent’s supply of workers, forcing them either to pay to get their workers back, or limit their options significantly until you hand them over at the Guardhouse. Minute Board Games described Architects of the West Kingdom as “worker placement on speed,” and I really can’t sum it up it any better than that.If you just let them go, you might find they’re gathering an absurd amount of resources and very quickly outbuilding you. There is a clear sharing of concept between the way Apprentices in Architects and how Crew in Raiders of the North Sea work, allowing for the same team-building mechanics that made Raiders such a hit. Semiotics, as a subdiscipline of board game design, is very badly under-emphasised and I appreciate that Shem Phillips is violently bucking that trend. The rules are complicated, but the actual gameplay is pretty simple: Just put down one piece and do whatever the location says.