Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
It should be mandatory for publishers to include score pads in games with multitudes of scoring opportunities and no scoring track. Be too disingenuous and you will be refused access to building the cathedral, while too much piety will leave you unable to access the resources of the Black Market. Phillips has thought of every eventuality, from double-sided player boards to aid replay-ability, down to multiplier cards for mid-game resource scarcity.
For context I already own some garphill games (Viscounts, paladins, raiders of scythia and hadrian's wall) and absolutely love all of them, all firmly in my top solo games! Do you spend a turn capturing your Artisan back or leave it on the board knowing your opponent may do the same? I will however mention that some of my cards have scuffed more easily than I would have liked, so this is something to watch out for if you shuffle more aggressively than the average person. How many times do you need to visit the same resource location before you have enough or someone might capture your workers? It’s an easy way to get a lot of points, but your Virtue will suffer and you’ll find yourself barred from working on the Cathedral.Building plans are also completely unique, which breeds more creativity in solving the problem of which combination of buildings to focus their efforts on. Essentially what I’m saying is that there is a moral case to be made that any time someone plays Architect for the first time your win should have an asterisk beside it.
I do appreciate that this game is a nice, lightweight worker placement game, with a twist and I love that twist.
Once the Guildhall fills up to the start of the third and fourth row, this also triggers a Black Market Reset. In a world where we have Codenames Disney and Marvel Splendor, I felt somewhat downhearted at what was happening before me. There is a small draft of building cards, and each player will end up with 3 Building cards to start the game.
Pushing your luck to grab three or four of a particular resource isn’t unheard of, and if nobody feels the need to capture your workers you can often press the advantage enough to not need that spot for the rest of the game. The other really nice addition that Age of Artisans brings, is a new player colour – orange – and along with it, the ability to play up to six-player games. Architects is a game you could very easily ignore everyone else and just focus on yourself but for me, some of the fun comes from the disruption you can cause your opponents.But you also make your worker group a more tempting prize for others looking to cut the legs away from under you. These come with end-game scoring effects and immediate build effects, and they may as well be in hieroglyphics for all the sense they’ll make to a newbie. Others might appeal because they provide you with an ongoing bonus every time you visit a stated location. While your opponent can free their workers directly from you, it’s pretty expensive to do so, where they have to pay money.
Turns just fly around the table once everyone knows how to play, which helps keep downtime to the barest of minimums. In this game, which is set in the 9th century, players are working to be the best at constructing buildings and the cathedral.
It’s the perfect game for a table that wants to go head-to-head for a couple hours but not have to get bogged down with tons of rules or excessive downtime. It’s just sort of odd to see in a hobby where so much of its output is the result of juxtaposed sensibilities working together on an incidental basis. From games to books, anything that could show me a shinier and more exciting world has always fascinated me. I have always liked the Worker Placement genre, and this game looked like it would hit a lot of my buttons. I must say that I don’t fully understand the ‘gaming the system’ strategy you are suggesting here, perhaps because I have tried to go down this road a couple of times with little success.
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