Oath of the Brotherhood

EvEvanstar2,5

This is a really well thought out worker placement recipe game. In general players are collecting three types of tokens and then placing workers in the spot that lets you complete a recipe and then take one of the three available recipes for that round to their hand. One of the most interesting things about the game is that each type of the three resources has four boxes on your player board, and storing a good in that spot gives you a cool player-interactive ability. Another really nice feature is as players take starting player, New action spots are revealed and added to the board, expanding options as the game continues. Now here's the bad. Of the 5 player abilities, 4 of the 5 are guys who can ignore 1 of a particular resource when completing their recipe, and the 5th guy just gets +1 vp per recipe completed. The game only makes 3 recipes available each turn, and because the take a recipe spot is the same as the complete a recipe spot, you never get to be picky about which card you pick up, and the cards get taken quickly. The vp bonus guy is at a major action disadvantage, and the +1 per just won't ever keep him in the running. Worse yet, there is a follower card that can be bought for a single gold who grants the same ability to whomever flip lucks him when it's their opportunity to be starting player. In fact, the follower cards in general are pretty uneven in strength. Some give you an extra resource when you visit a particular spot, others make you spend a resource in a particular spot to get two other resources. Essentially they do the same thing of granting you 1 extra thing, but half of them require a complicated setup to use and the other half simply 2x a single action, which is a lot easier to benefit from. Despite these quibbles I overall like the game, although maybe the flip luck is a bit high. I don't think I'd ever recommend this for 5 players, and i would play this without the +1 vp character at all times. I would also house rule it so that you can see the follower card who will be available in the following round, and I would have possibly twice the number of recipe cards up each round, and only refill empty spaces in the display rather than flushing them every turn. That being said, I don't think that anything about this game is so compelling that it stands out in the field of other worker placement games. ★ 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