Templar: The Secret Treasures

EvEvanstar5,9

In this game you are running your pawn around a central board dropping off treasure tokens, then trying to get the scoring pawn to make it into those rooms, and score them. This is all done through a card-as-roundel system similar to Concordia, where you play cards from your symmetrical hands, until you decide to play the reset card to get all your cards back. The unique element here is that you can't play a card that's faceup on another player's discard pile. This makes for a really fantastic prediction puzzle with exactly 4 players. With 3, there's not enough restriction as to what you can play and with 4 it's too much restriction. The other compelling element is that when a room gets scored, it scores for all players in that room, adding a lot of benefit to watching other player's plans and actions. Then there are big endgame bonus points for being in every room, and rings have the potential to score several times if you are clever. This all adds up to a fantastic experience, even if it mostly comes down to tactics. That being said, there are some cards in each player's decks that are less compelling than others. Often times cards such as 'move the locked door' for example, are just played as a delay effect until someone's top discard gets cleared opening the way for the next player in line to use that card. Despite that, this game has been a bit hit every time it's hit the table with exactly four players. The components could be better. It's not always super clear which tokens have already been scored and which haven't. The rulebook is a little rough, in particular during setup in numbering the rooms and when describing the movement of the figure that follows the scoring pawn, preventing it from scoring the same room twice in a row. The cards can also be somewhat hard to see in your opponent's discard pile from across the table. ☆ 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

Jose Guillermo Forero Leonstar6,0

A7