Designers: Peter Lee, Rodney Thompson

I really love it when American companies and American designers put Euro mechanics into their games because the result is usually the best of both worlds. You get the thematic fun factor of Ameritrash games and you get the cleverness of Euro style mechanics. Some of my most beloved games are blending’s of American and European design’s, for example Fantasy Flights Twilight Imperium 3rd edition. Lords of Waterdeep is also such a game, a worker placement game thick with Euro design but layered with the fantastic Dungeons and Dragons franchise from the Wizards of fantasy themselves.

In Lords of Waterdeep you take on the role of one of the many powerful lords in the city of splendors, vying for control of the city through dirty politics, economic exploits and back alley deals. While this theme is prevalent visually through the use of Intrigue and quest cards, like most worker placement games it’s a thin visual layer rather than a mechanical link to the games theme. Sure you’re a Lord of Waterdeep, you have a card that represents who you are tucked away throughout the game that has a special mission for you but at the end of it all it’s a game about scoring points through the management of resources. This game could have easily been done with pretty much any theme you can think of, D&D however was a very good choice as it’s visually pleasing and familiar to most gamers. As a D&D fan, it really did it for me.

To win the game you must score points and like Caylus where much of the design was borrowed there are quite a few ways to do this. It’s all about those little workers representing the very limited resource you have to work with. The player that manages them the best will win the game.

Each round players will place one of their workers on spots on the gameboard represented by different parts of the city. Each spots yields a resource of some sort or allows you to take some sort of action. Typically you earn different types of resource cubes that technically represent mercenaries you hire (Wizards, Fighters, Clerics etc..). Some spots earn you money, others allow you to draw or play intrigue cards. One of the spots gets you the all-important first player token that will give you first dibs on the board the following round, while others allow you to draw quest cards which when completed by turning in the required resources earn you points. You can also place your workers on the only construction spot which lets you add buildings to the board, those buildings become new spots for workers expanding the types of actions players can take in the future, but each time someone uses that spot the player who owns the building gets a reward which is typically more points or resources.

The key to the game is completing quests. Quests come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes from mini quests that earn you 4 or 5 points, to mega quest that can earn you 25+ points. Each quest requires a different amount of resources to complete, so managing your workers to earn those resources, to fill your quests is the most critical way to earning points. However these quests once completed often give you new special powers as well that have lasting effects so there are other advantageous to be gained for completing quests aside from points.

Finally there are the intrigue cards which are a vital interaction between players and create a great deal of tension and sometimes outright hostility. It’s how you can impact the plans of other players and it’s very effective. Often playing a single intrigue card can prevent all of your opponents from completing a quest in any given round, so if used wisely, intrigue cards can lead you to victory.

Lords of Waterdeep takes a lot of its design from the classic worker placement game Caylus, having the same level of strategic depth, but with less complexity. This worker placement game is in fact so easy that you can setup and start playing without explaining the rules and simply learning to play on the run. That in itself makes Lords of Waterdeep a far superior game to the much more difficult to teach/learn Caylus. I think the most attractive element of Lords of Waterdeep is that it’s really tight, every decision you make, every round is a tough one, but the game (when no one is suffering from analysis paralysis) moves very quickly. It’s one of the few games I have ever played that says 60 minutes to play and the game can actually take 60 minutes, even in a five player game.

I think in terms of worker placement, Lords of Waterdeep is probably one of my favorites right now. It’s worth mentioning that while the base game is great, the expansion, Scoundrels of Skullport adds a tremendous level of depth to the game and really pushes this into the love it category for me. It’s really a must have. Scoundrels of Skullport adds new spots on the board, new buildings, new intrigue cards and new quests, but it also adds the new mechanic corruption. Corruption effectively allows players to take advantage of more powerful effects via buildings, worker placement spots and card (quest and intrigue), but using them earns you corruption which are worth minus points at the end of the game. The trick is that the more corruption there is in the city (the more players get them) the more minus points each corruption is worth. There are ways to give players corruption and get rid of your own. This creates yet another level of hostility and competition between the players, it really becomes a knife fight in a phone booth. It’s wonderful and any fan of Lords of Waterdeep should consider their game incomplete without the expansion, it’s that good.

2012 was really a great year for board gaming, we got Star Wars X-Wing, Descent 2nd edition, Robinson Crusoe, REX, Android Netrunner. It was just amazing and Lords of Waterdeep very deservingly should have it’s name mentioned in that list. It would easily make my top 10 of 2012 and if it wasn’t for that damned Star Wars X-Wing I would seriously be considering it for the number one spot, that is how much I like it.

Highly recommend, in particular if you’re a fan of Caylus, this game will easily replace that game for you. I’m not sure I would consider it a good game based on the theme alone though, it’s quite thin so for D&D fans who played other Peter Lee & Rodney Thompson from some of their previous D&D games you should know that the theme is quite thin. This is not so much a good D&D game as it is just a great worker placement game. It’s greatness is firmly in its mechanical design and the clever interaction between players. It’s a no brainer for me, this is a game that deserves previous shelf space.

Designer: Dirk Henn

Rio Grande typically releases Euro style games and as such I approach anything they make with caution. Not that I have anything against games made in Europe, but I find that the quality of the games wavers greatly most having a pretty limited feel for game board presence and emersion, rather focusing strictly on mechanics. In fact you can take almost any Rio Grande game, strip its typically thin layered theme and replace it with zero impact on the game. I really dislike games without a proper mechanical connection to its theme but I’m a sucker for games based on medieval Japan so when I heard about Dirk Henn designed Shogun I was excited but cautious.

Shogun is largely based on another Dirk Henn creation called Wallestein using similar mechanics but built around the map of Japan. The three key mechanics around which the game resolves is the use of a cube tower for the resolution of combat and a pre-action planning phase in which players decide what they are going to do for the entire round in secret in advance followed by an execution phase of those actions.

The combination of the three core mechanics mixed in with some resource management and interesting strategic elements like trying to predict what your opponents are going to do effectively creates a solid strategic game with a madning element of often unpredictable combination of actions as players plans interact during the action phase. The suprising thing about it is how true to the theme it really is. All the chaos of war and economics blended into a wonderfully simple yet fun mechanic. I have found that this game creates so many great “oh shit” and “gotcha” moments. It’s just plain fun.

I never played Wallenstein so when I committed to buying the game I only had a vague idea about the origins of the mechanics but unlike most cube pushing Euro games, there was some purpose behind those cubes outside of simply saving money on components.

The main battle resolution mechanic (the cube tower) is used when a battle is to be resolved between two armies (made of cubes). Essentially all the cubes from the attacking territory and defending territory are picked up and thrown into the cube tower and what comes out are the results of the battle. The cube tower itself has layers of cardboard with holes in alternate position which causes many of the cubes to get stuck in the tower. The result is a rather unpredictable but ultimately anticipation and excitement building result. The fun part is that quite often more cubes come out than where put in for any given battle as cubes that are thrown in can knock loose existing cubes from previous rounds of combat. Chaos yes, fun definitely, but is it thematic? Surprisingly the answer is yes.

It’s a bit gimmicky I will say that but combat is actually not the main focus of the game, its equal parts resource management and planning, with a part of that being the resolution of battles so the fact that its unpredictable actually creates a unique nuance where planning is often offset by unexpected defeats and surprise victories.  Not unlike dice or cards, but without that statistically predictable element where you know going into it that there are x cards or y type in the deck or that odds wise you are likely to roll that 1 to 5 you need to win a fight.

I really love this mechanic but really like the impact on the game is only a part of the whole. Shogun also shines in the resource management and planning department.

During the action phase players will take 10 actions each round. The caveat here is that these 10 actions will happen in a randomly determined order each round (using cards) and you will only be aware of the order of the first 5 actions in the planning phase and which actions they will be. This little trick has an awesome effect in which you not only must plan well and manage resources well, but you also have to think about the order of the 5 hidden actions that will appear in random order later in the round. Sort of planning for the unexpected.

Again, like the cube tower, I love this mechanic, it’s really clever and creates a lot of dynamics which is one of the things most Euro games fail at miserably and again, creates a lot of great moments during the action phase.

The great thing about Shogun for me is that it’s a fast game. It’s really got this great tempo which constantly keeps everyone involved as so many of the activities are done simultaneously. Throwing cubes into the tower always creates exciting moments when it’s your turn or not and the planning phase really feels like you’re a strategic leader trying to outsmart your opponents for the coming action.

The game is played over the course of 2 years and in each year there are 4 season (rounds) so you effectively play 8 rounds. This fixed time period means you’re under pressure to act, so right out of the gate in round one there is action and the tempo just picks up until the final rounds which are frantic land grabs and last minute heroic moves to try to get that final edge. I really love the fact that scoring only happens at the end of each year (hence you only have 2 opportunities to score points). It means that something that happens in the summer that might have been detrimental to your score can be fixed by the time winter comes. It gives everyone a chance to make a comeback and that is one thing that is so awesomely built into the game. It’s highly unlikely anyone is ever eliminated from the game, but it’s also very likely that someone falling behind suddenly has a surge because of the way combat actions work its actually often beneficial to fight out of a couple of strong locations rather than being spread thin all over the map.

There are so many great nuances and dynamic elements to this game and its one of the few Euro games out there that does a wonderful job of blending the theme into the game. I never played Wallenstein, but to be frank the thirty year war is a rather dry theme, I’m not surprised that this game is ranked in the top 100 games on boardgamegeek.com. I will be talking about other Japanese medieval era games, as I have a few, but this one is by far my favorite. Very easy to learn, extremely difficult to master and visually, despite the cubes, it’s very appealing. A lot of great ingenuity went into this game and I’m glad to see that there are games like this coming out of Euro publishers that prove that you can be both a Euro game and have a theme and still be a great game.

Love it, recommend it!