Renegade Game Studios Architects of the West Kingdom Game for 1-5 Players Aged 12 & Up

This game is awesome. There are so many nuances to the game that it is easily one of my favorites, and it is the game that I want to play the most. Components: This box is jam packed with stuff - it's hard to fit it all! The game board is beautiful, and is very nice quality. The workers and goods are all nicely produced wooden pieces, and the cards are quality stock. The minor things that I find less desirable are that the box could definitely benefit from a better insert for organization purposes (I had to modify mine to contain sleeved cards and all the other components and was even a tight fit without sleeves with the "insert"). Additionally, they give you cards to represent multiples of goods which I am not a big fan of. I just wish I had more goods, and a better insert to handle these pieces as there is room. Neither of these things affects gameplay, but they are something I wish they had done differently. Lastly, I wish the player boards were made of thick cardboard, as that would have really made it pop. With these few things, the look and feel is not as great as it could and should be - although it is still incredible. Gameplay: There are two main ways to try to get larger amounts of victory points, with lots of ways to get smaller amounts of victory points as well so that players can pick different ways to try and win. There is some player interaction in this game as well which is great because lots of worker placement games are mainly trying to see which spaces are still open, and where your opponents may place their workers - not this game, here you want to pay attention to where other players are putting their workers so that you can capture them to acquire things you want. The fact that you start with all your workers is also really cool. There are so many places to put your workers..... Oh yeah, it also has a good solo mode, and you can play 2 players with and auto - very cool and well thought out. Overall: For my minor issues I would normally take a star off because this game looks AMAZING, and then there are some shortcuts taken, which for me I normally find dissapointing. HOWEVER, the gameplay is sooooo great that I just can't bring myself to do that. 5 stars.

I really liked Shem Phillips' North Sea Trilogy. Raiders of the North Sea is one of my favorites. I was a bit hesitant about purchasing this one, Architects, because it kind of seemed to me to be the same game, only with a different setting. But I heard a ton of buzz about it and when I was given a gift card for Amazon, I decided to get it. Excellent game! And it's not just a re-skin of Raiders! It's a little tougher to learn, I think, but not much harder. This game, instead of being Vikings, you are royal architects in the Carolingian Empire, trying to impress the king. This is a lot of fun. It plays up to 5 and is not bad with that player count. Raiders can be a bit lengthy with 5 players. Architects is better. I would highly recommend before you actually play a real game of it, to just setup a 2-player version and play a couple of turns with yourself, so that you get an idea of how to play and how the turns should work. Then it's much easier to teach others on game night. I still haven't decided if I like Raiders or Architects better. The graphics on both are amazing. I do appreciate that Architects came with a solo mode. With Raiders it's an expansion, but only available direct from the publisher in New Zealand, which means you're going to pay more than the expansion costs for shipping.

This is a really fun game! It is easy to learn via an online video but also has some of the best written directions as well. We have played it multiple times in the same week because each game is so different. There are multiple pathways to victories so you can try different strategies every time you play. There are many options for each move so as long as players don’t overanalyze every turn, it moves pretty quickly. Doesn’t take very long to set up either. Love this game—it’s a keeper!!!

This game is a fun, fast paced, and very engaging worker placement game. The thick rule book and absolute plethora of options for play may seem a little daunting at first blush, but a few rounds into the game everything snaps into place. Game play moves along at a brisk pace and every move offers an opportunity for an effective move no matter where other players have placed their workers. Even the last move will likely offer opportunities to score some points. I just played this game for the first time with members of our gaming group and everyone loved it. Game play is similar, but subtly different from other games designed along these lines such as Raiders of the North Sea and Explorers of the North Sea. If you enjoyed the aforementioned games, then you will also like this game, but it is without a doubt different enough to justify buying it. I'll add that I'm glad they had the same artist do the artwork for this game as I love his style and it absolutely adds to the feel of this game.

I have to say that I really liked Viscounts of the West Kingdom in this series of games, but felt a little mixed on Paladins, so where does Architects fall in? Let’s find out and get to the review! PRO, 5 out of 5: VIRTUE TRACK. In Architects of the West Kingdom, certain actions move you up or down the virtue track. The top of the track features bonus victory points that you can grab, while the bottom of the track can leave you with negative points. But what really makes this fun for me are the other effects, such as being limited with the number of actions you can take when near the top of the track. This also applies to the bottom of the track, but there you have these bonuses, and actions cost less silver. So there’s this incentive to scrape the bottom of the barrel on the track, so to speak, and then it’s pretty fun to try and dig yourself back up afterwards. MIX, 2.5 out of 5: QUICK TURNS. I often find the game turns to have a micro-turn structure. What I mean by this is that game turns in Architects are incredibly fast. You place a single worker, then you flip a card and the A.I. places a worker, back and forth, etc., just literally “1 worker, 1 action, and done.” On the positive side, this is quick and tense because as you try to build things up, the A.I. might swoop in at any moment and mess up your plans. But on the negative side, it could feel a bit herky-jerky to do your action and then flip and interpret the A.I. card. The quick back and forth also kind of takes away the possibility of fun combo-licious turns. PRO, 5 out of 5: A.I. OPPONENT. Again, the A.I. is very simple. You just flip over cards, and they’ll tell you what space the A.I. worker takes, what actions it does, etc. Now the A.I. might be a mix for some players because it can be very random, and the cards coming out can do things that make absolutely no sense or even skip actions for the A.I. But what I like about this randomness is that it contributes to the tension of the worker placement because as I’ll discuss below, you’re going to be putting workers down and getting a bigger bonus if you keep on going to the same space, but you don’t when the A.I. is going to swoop in and capture those workers. As a result, the tension of the A.I.’s randomness actually makes the game more exciting in most cases. MAJOR CON, 0 out of 5: BUILD AND COMBOS. For my taste, Architects of the West Kingdom is very tactical but not as strategic as I’d like. To explain what I mean, Architects has a lot of the elements that would usually be present in some kind of engine-builder. For example, you can recruit apprentices that give you ongoing powers, and buildings can give you end-game scoring. But the effects and powers of these apprentices and buildings are so limited and have so few opportunities for comboing with each other that you don’t really feel like you’re getting stronger by the end of the game. A bigger concern for me is that there isn’t much variety from play to play. PRO, 5 out of 5: WORKER PLACEMENT. Placing workers and building them up for greater and greater actions is really amazing. The more workers you get in one action space, the bigger the result you get from them, but the A.I. can capture workers in one location. Likewise, you can capture their workers, which can get you money and also lock them down for a while so that they can’t be used. All of this gives the gameplay some nice tension and a feeling of pushing your luck, like how long can I keep on using this action space before the A.I. swoops in and grabs all of my units? Then trying to save them from jail can involve the virtue track that I previously mentioned . . . lots of cool stuff here that gives the game its highest moments of fun for me. OVERALL SCORE: 3.5 out of 5 (rounded up to 4). Architects of the West Kingdom sits in an odd space when compared to the rest of the trilogy for me. It’s definitely simpler, quicker, and a lot more straightforward than the other games in the series. It’s certainly not unseating Viscounts because that one has much better variety in the play. Personally, I enjoyed Architects more than Paladins because even though the puzzley feel and combos in Paladins are better, Architects is much more accessible. You might also like Architects if you enjoy lightweight Euros, especially ones with a lot of player interaction and “take that.” But on the other hand, if you want a lot of heavy strategy, tons of combos, or a real feeling of building up an engine with things ramping up, Architects didn’t have a lot of that for me. Happy gaming! This is Dr. D, and I’m out!

GAMEPLAY In usual worker placement games you have 2-5 workers and a fixed number of rounds. Every round, players take turns to place their workers on certain spots to take that action. These spots are then blocked for subsequent turns. At the end of round they call their workers back. Here's how the game is different from other worker placement games: * Almost all the spots support unlimited number of workers. * There's no concept of rounds, the game ends when work on the cathedral is complete. * The more number of workers at a location, the better the reward. Say you send a worker to quary in 1st turn, you gain 1 stone. Next time you send a worker to quarry, you've two workers on the quary and you gain 2 stones. * Your workers don't return to you at end of round (as there's no round). You have to take an action to call your workers from a spot. * Players can capture opponents workers from the board and optionally send them to prison (for money) * A player can free their worker from opponent or from prison by paying the cost. The primary objective of the game is to gain maximum victory points. During the game you take turns taking resources by going to different locations on the board (stone, brick, wood, coin, gold, marble etc), recruiting apprentices, building structures and working on cathedrals. The game has a virtue track. Your virtue adjusts based on your actions. It goes up when you work on cathedrals, building schools etc, but it goes down when you perform action at the black market or build structures such as gambling house etc. Based on your position on the virtue track certain positions on the gameboard may not be available to you. PLAYER COUNT AND DURATION The game plays in about 90 mins. The player count doesn't increase the duration as the game ends when the cathedral work is complete. The game plays well for 2-5 players. No scaling issues as all the locations allow multiple workers. The automa mode is pretty good and competitive. I've played it two times with 1 win and 1 loss. COMPONENT QUALITY The Component Quality is Good. The resources are made of light wood. The coins are made of card-board. The game board is big and pretty. The art work on gameboard, player mats, building cards and apprentices is really cool. It's a cartoon-ish theme similar to other games from the same manufacturer (raiders of the north sea). CONCLUSION We really enjoyed the game. The best part of the game is capturing opponent's workers. It makes for really fun and interesting player interactions! The good (working on cathedral) and bad sides (black market for quick resources) are well-balanced and you can chart a path to victory via both ways. Highly recommend it.

This game is relatively easy to learn (and pretty family friendly), but with lots of different strategies and play styles, nearly impossible to master. The first few times playing take a long time to get through, but once everyone gets it, the game goes fast. There are a bunch of small parts and a big board to setup, so I wouldn’t say that it’s great for traditional traveling and the box is kinda chunky to just throw in a bag, but if I only had to pick a couple of games to take to a board game night, this would definitely be one of them.

Fun game for family play. It takes a game or two to learn, not completely obvious or easy, but not hard either. A few games into it, we now love it. This is a classic game of strategy and planning, accumulating building materials, choosing some talent cards, with good compromises along the way. Similar to Catan or Splendor -- I personally still prefer Splendor but this is a welcome alternative for some variety.