How to Play World Wonders

World Wonders is a pretty simple game of tile laying. Each round players take turns spending their seven gold. With that gold you buy tiles, roads, towers, and wonders to place on your player board. You can also buy first and second player but in a two player game that happens less.

You need to build roads so that you can place buildings. And when you place buildings you try and get matching colors or specific color combinations to get wonders. All of this is done in ways to optimize your point scoring. And each thing that you buy has a different cost, so how you spend your money matters a fair amount. Especially with wonders that cost the rest of your gold, whether that’s one gold or six.

You score in a number of different ways in World Wonders. Firstly, wonders give you points. Then there are three tracks you can go up on which push you up on your population track. If you reach the top of that population track you get points. Then surrounded buildings, on all sides not by land and those score points. But you can lose points if you take out a loan and then don’t pay them back. The player with the most points wins.

Initial Impressions

World Wonders is another tile laying, polyomino game. And that isn’t a bad thing, though, the market is starting to become very full of them. New York Zoo, Barenpark, Planet Unknown, and that’s barely scratching the surface. So it needs to stand out in a style of game that is becoming more crowded. So, does World Wonders do that?

Decision Space

From the ones that I’ve played, I haven’t played all of those listed above, I think that it does. Though, it doesn’t stand out due to complexity of the game. World Wonders is easier than most tile playing or polyomino games. I see World Wonders as a game that I can play with my family. I think once the basic rules are understood, maybe a couple of rounds, my wife will enjoy it, may parents might even enjoy it.

This is a solid and accessible game. And I think it does a good thing with game length as well. More players will make the game longer, but the game turns are simple. Buy a piece and place it, whether that’s a tower, wonder, or road. My only knock on the game is that the player aids, for a five player game, are short a couple. If you provide player aids in a game, provide one per player.

Accessibility of the Game

You see all of the wonders and you expect those to be complex. They are not. There is iconography, but after seeing one or two wonders cards, you understand it. That is a hallmark of a good design. In fact, there isn’t any language to the game which also makes it easier to play and more accessible.

A kid with limited reading ability can play this game. An adult with maybe can’t see a lot of small text would be able to sit down and play this game. Now, the tiles do have little symbols on them. Those would be the hardest element of the game to see. But that information only matters to the player who bought the tile so players can aid each other with that.

World Wonders

Is this a game that sounds interesting to you? If so it will be getting a wider release this year. I think I heard October or November, but with shipping, especially around the holidays or leading up to them, I could see this being a game that release closer to that Christmas and holiday time frame.

Just my initial impressions on it, I think this will be a game that will work for a ton of people. I like the game a lot myself. It’s accessible, it has a good play length, and the toy factor is fun. The pieces are nice quality for the game. But it doesn’t turn the game into a behemoth, so you sit down and play what feels like a normal, but slightly fancier board game.

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The Reckoners Game Play

The Reckoners is a cooperative team where players take on the roles of the various Reckoners trying to take down epics, the supervillains. This is done in two ways. you either attack or research the epics. When you research an epic completely, that is finding their weakness and makes it easier to kill them.

As you defeat epics, they are trying to take down the population, find your base, and generally mess up your plans. And they are working for Steelheart, the biggest epic. Figuring out his weakness and being able to attack him at all only happens as you defeat the other epics, and he’s messing with you even more than they are.

If you research and damage Steelheart enough to take him down, you win the game. And the population hitting zero causes you to lose the game.

What Doesn’t Work?

The variety in the game is lacking. This is in a few different ways. The epics, while different, don’t feel massively different. It’d make the game more complex, but the game is pretty simple to learn. I hope the expansion gives them more things they can do. Also, Steelheart is the only big bad guy. And while you move from location to location, as does Steelheart, there is nothing unique about them.

Basically, the game does make the characters you play unique in a single way. But opportunities were missed to add in a little complexity, but also make the game more variable. I played with six people, that means every character is in play. So even then, there isn’t variability in a six player game. The expansion does add more Reckoners you can play which will change up the game. Same with more epics, and more bosses to fight.

What Works?

The simple game play is very good. Mainly because everything happens at once. You roll your dice, keeping some Yahtzee style, each time. And the same for using the dice. Once everyone is done rolling, you spend your dice all at once. It’s a bit chaotic, but the only slow moments are going through what the epics do and everyone can help with that.

The actions are simple as well. You can research, deal with henchmen, attack an epic, get money to buy more gear, get a wild card token, or contain an epic. Researching and attacking I’ve already talked about. Money to buy stuff makes sense. The wild card is basically a free action next round. Containing is the trickiest, but not that hard. It means that the epics do less when they activate. And you can do that to any epic or Steelheart, if you are at their location.

The production of the game is also amazing and it helps the game. The artwork is extremely good. The dice are nice and chunky and easy to read. Plus there are many Game Trayz to hold the locations, sliders for the epics and Steelheart, and spots to slot in dice as you keep them and spend them. Is it an over the top production, most certainly, but it is really nice and it is easy to get to the table.

What Do I Want To See In More Plays?

Well, I only have experience at the six player count. I want to try this at a lower player count. The scaling in the game makes sense, so I want to see how well it works. Plus different difficulties. We beat it on easy on the last possible turn before we’d have lost. So it is challenging on easy. Granted, we could optimize our play better. So normal seems like an interesting challenge as well.

I also want to see how different the game feels. Will I do the same things each time? Is the game a limited puzzle with limited shelf life? Is the expansion needed to keep it fresh? I definitely could see if I played the game a lot, it being one that loses steam as time goes by.

The Reckoners Initial Impressions

I like this game a lot. I think after one play I rate it as an 8.5 out of 10. It is a very accessible cooperative game. The packaging, the huge box and all the trays and things, it makes it look way more intimidating than it actually is. I could pull out The Reckoners and play with most people. And while the theme won’t come across that much, it is still a fun theme to work with.

It reminds me a bit of the Dresden Files Cooperative Card game when it comes to theme. If you know the source material, the theme is there. If you don’t, it is still a really good game. This one I think is even more accessible than that one is. And does the theme better, but just slightly. And as you learn the theme, you might want to read the books because of the game.

Have you played the Reckoners? What are you thoughts?

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The Setting of Tainted Grail: The Last Knight

Let’s start with the setting. It is still the lands of Avalon, but time has passed by and the lands are now covered in a snow. The Wyrdness isn’t as bad, but food is scarcer and you’re worried about exposure. All of the “heroes” have gotten lost in a snowstorm, found each other, but also all have scene a four armed foredweller. In the cold, will they survive and find their way back to a village. But even if they do that, it doesn’t solve the issue that their village is having.

I really like this new setting, and the new mechanic is brutal. I’ll talk about that later though. By throwing all of Avalon under a blanket of ice and snow, the world feels different. And while I kind of remember the map from before, it took a little bit to place everything. And that’s nice that it did. If it was too familiar or the story felt like the same thing, I’d have been less interested. Right now we’re just trying to survive, but we don’t even know what we feel like our end goal is going to me.

Exposure

This is one of the new things in the game, and I will say that it is brutal. To help balance this, they made it so that if you’re outside of the range a Menhir, you don’t lose two health and gain two terror, you just game a terror at the start of each day. But exposure is basically the cold seeping into your bones. If you keep moving and don’t run into any issues, you won’t get it. But when you get exposure, it doesn’t leave your body until you’re told to remove it. It basically caps your max health.

Now, that’s not great because that can limit your energy and cause you to panic faster. Though, in story mode, which we are playing, that isn’t the case. In story mode, it doesn’t limit either of those things, but obviously, less health is bad. And you’re still gaining terror as you go, pushing you to go insane. But it isn’t as brutal, just might get you dying faster, well, much faster.

The Menhir

Another new thing to start the game at least is that we don’t know how the light the Menhir, okay, that isn’t new, but there aren’t Menhir on the map at all. There are Menhir on the map, but they are leaking magic, not something that we can light at this point. Our town has no Menhir on it at all. There are seals and those things help keep exposure at bay that are called Menhir seals, but we can’t light them yet.

And in the original, you got the Menhir rites immeidately. That is the point of the first chapter to get the rights. Here, that’s not the case. Nothing points us to getting those rites thus far. We might have some hints at it, but nothing that directs. So gaining terror every day, that could be a thing for a while.

New Combat Traits

There are also new things in combat. None of them are good. In fact, a lot of them are really bad. Frostbite is a keyword that just gives you exposure every single time. Multi-attack hits everyone. They definitely haven’t made it any easier to fight the monsters in Avalon. I expected things to get changed up this way, adding in new keywords isn’t that hard to do, and I’m glad that they did.

They actually cleaned up some other keywords, such as some secrets now have the word Global on them. There were some that it was implied on some of the previous secrets but now it is explicit. That makes the game easier to play, th ough wasn’t hard before. It mainly makes it cleaner to play.

Importing From Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

So, this was something I wanted to know how they’d make it work. Basically, decisions in the previous campaign that made a difference to ours. Honestly, I was disappointed in this. Now, let me be fair, I wasn’t disappointed in the game. We didn’t get a lot of things done. That is on us, not on the game. Or we could have done a whole lot more. We swapped out one location based off of what we’d previously done. And I checked a single box in the legacy section.

I think there are around fifteen of those different legacy boxes. Probably another four or five locations we could have swapped out as well. We didn’t though, because of how we played the game. And, if you remember me talking about going back and playing Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon again, I wasn’t sure I wanted to, now I am ready to play it again. And I could, almost, play it solo right now if I wanted to. But for a few things.

Adding Base Content

And this is the thing blocking me. You add in base content for the expansions. This includes monsters that you add into the decks. You use the random events from the base game. Secrets from the base game, the items, and the help cards. So there are a lot of things that get used between the games. And I like that, in some ways. There isn’t a need to reinvent the wheel every time you play a campaign. Using things across games is really nice. However, now I need to figure out how to store it all.

I wish things would easily slot into the base box. But I’ll always need to pull out the second box to at least get the miniatures for our characters, unless I leave them out or loose somehow. I wish I had an easy way to just swap stuff out of the base box to only get that one out. Make it more generic for only the active campaign. Granted, with how it was shipped, I don’t think that’d be possible. And this protects the miniatures more.

Initial Impressions on Tainted Grail: The Last Knight

The first thing I think is that I wish we’d continued in The Fall of Avalon one session longer. I think we might have gotten more check marks. After that, I like it thus far. I can see how not in story mode this would be extremely brutal. Exposure can stack up really fast and that’d make a slow journey back to town or somewhere to heal yourself.

And I also want to add, we already have something we wish that we’d done. Now, not something that is that important, it is just a branching path that we didn’t go down because of choices we made. That would be very different and unique to what we’d done. The fact it’s an option in the first chapter is great. I am excited to play more of this game and then the final campaign as well.

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