Archon: Glory & Machination

EvEvanstar5,9

This is a wonderful worker placement game plagued by some of the worst graphic design choices I have ever seen. In our first game, we played the first two rounds thinking the spot on the board that produced soldiers needed black cubes when in fact in round three we realized that it needed grey cubes. That's right, the cube colors in this game are black, grey, wooden, tan and white. The same colors are used for the players, although the resources are not tied to the players at all. The board is about two leafs too large for the amount of actual things on it. The action spots are also blended into the white streets of the board making actual gameplay related things hard to easily see when you are sitting on the opposite end of the table. All that being said, the game is still a really fantastic and enjoyable worker placement game. When you place a worker you use a card along with that worker, and the card can give that worker a special ability in a really simple and pleasant deck-building way. You always have the same number of cards in a round, so rather than having a family growth system, this game just has you upgrade your workers so your array of cards slowly gets better. The game also requires you to plan a full turn ahead, as every other round you chose 5 cards to use the next round, and then the other 5 in the following round. Points come from defending the castle, constructing buildings which help your engine, upgrading your cards or buying science and art cards that do nothing other than score at the end of the round. You really never feel like you have enough actions. If you have the chance to play this game, and you can get past all the terrible terrible graphic design choices, this is a game you should play. What we did for game 2 that helped a ton, was whenever on the board we saw a picture of the grey (silver) cube, we put an ore token on it from the stonemaiergames resource set, and we replaced just the grey cubes with matching tokens. It made everything so much smoother. ☆ 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