Forum Trajanum

EvEvanstar5.9

Each round two cards flip. Then players look at their personal boards and remove a face-down token of their choice from the row and/or column matching the icon on each of the two cards. Then they examine the backsides of the tokens to choose which bonus they want, keep one, pass the other to their right. In turn order, of the two tokens you now have, you choose to actually claim the bonus from one of them. Then take a build action. In order to build a building you need the workers of the correct colors to spend, which are mostly gotten from token bonuses, and you also need the space cleared from removing tokens on your player board to build on. Your positioning choices matter here because there are cards that you can meet the requirements of at the end of each round for large vp bonuses that look to see how many times you matched the pattern on the card. There are also points for having different sets of colorless buildings in each row on your board, with an increasing score multiplier as you build your engine of abilities again by selecting effects on those face down bonus tokens. You also get bumps on the three tech tracks if you build grey buildings of specific types. If that wasn't enough, players also compete for spaces in the center board when they complete colored buildings. Points get awarded for having contiguous blobs of claimed spaces and bonuses get claimed for being the one to put the final marker into a colored area. I found this game to be incredibly difficult to work through. Every turn felt like I was getting tough choices. There are worker markers that act as luck mitigation tokens for most situations and knowing when to spend them is a super interesting piece of the puzzle. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment

MeMestremutenstar6.0

Rating: 3/5 Production value: 3/4 Is the game in my collection/Love to have?: 0/1