Dice Tower Con 2019 in review, part 4

SATURDAY

While at the Weird Giraffe booth (like big Euros, Weird Giraffe became a theme of the convention for us) we kept hearing about Stellar Leap, another space-themed game with a dice-rolling engine aspect a la Machi Koro. When we spotted a copy in the library we decided to give it a try. It turned out to be a lightweight 3.5X game (you can attack other players, but you can’t actually knock them out of the game) with some neat mechanical twists. You can perform up to 5 actions on your turn, two from column A and up to three from column B. These include increasing population, moving population from one planet to another, exploring new planets, mining asteroids, and sending out away teams. The production quality is quite nice – multi-level player boards are always welcome when cubes are involved, and the species meeples are different shapes as well as being different colors – and the hidden goals make the game-play interesting and repeatable. If you want to take over the galaxy but don’t have the time for something like Twilight Imperium, give Stellar Leap a look.

After lunch we headed into the vendor hall for a bit and were able to get in a demo of It’s a Wonderful World. This is a card-drafting engine builder with an interesting resource mechanic. Cards are drafted and then players either keep them to build or discard them to gain resources immediately after the draft is complete. There is a central board containing five different resources, which are gained by the players in the order that the resources are placed on their board. Cards that are being built (added to the engine) are completed as soon as they have enough resources on them. Cards that are already in the engine generate resources during the five phases (one for each type). If you can complete a card during the first phase, for example, it will then begin generating resources from the second phase onward. Some cards will also generate additional tokens that add to end-game scoring, or will provide different methods of scoring points. For all of the things going on the game plays quite quickly. The Kickstarter is still fulfilling so the game was not available for purchase but it has made my short list for things to pick up.

We spotted a couple of nice people (whose names I unfortunately forgot to record) with a Players Wanted sign setting up The Networks, a game which Bob had played but I had not, and so we joined them. As one might guess from the box cover, The Networks is a set-collecting game of trying to manage a television network. The goal is to get combinations of shows, stars and advertisements that work well together in order to generate money. The core mechanics are easy to understand. Choosing the right time to take the various elements from the central market can be tricky, requiring you to keep an eye on your opponents in order to best gauge when you can wait a bit longer and when you have to grab a star or a show immediately. A very good game that I would consider buying if Bob didn’t already have a copy.

Then at long last we got a chance to play Lorenzo il Magnifico, another in the “big Euro” theme. This time the Teacher/Player Wanted signs attracted Scott, who had played the game enough to keep us on the right track. Lorenzo is a worker-placement economic game where the workers’ strength varies from turn to turn, changing what they can accomplish. Being first to perform certain actions can be a benefit, while showing up later has an additional cost. Trying to determine what order to play your various workers and which tasks to give them is the heart of the game. Completing buildings and conquering provinces create a pair of mini engine building games, where the engines can then be “run” by placing a worker in the appropriate spot. Avoiding the wrath of the Church is important, especially in the latter part of the game when the penalties for showing insufficient piety can be significant. I am not sure if I liked Lorenzo more than Great Western Trail, but I definitely would play it again. Like GWT it’s a cube-pushing Euro-econ game so if that’s your thing it is worth a look.

After taking Lorenzo back to the library (again) we were pondering what to play next when we ran across Alex and Todd who suggested Architects of the West Kingdom. Architects is a delightful hybrid economic worker-placement game about horrible people trying to build a cathedral. I say horrible people because one of the primary money-making tactics in the game is arresting other players’ workers and selling them to jail. When you buy certain items, you pay part of the cost to the bank and part of it to the tax collector (unless your reputation is low enough that taxes aren’t a concern). The tax collector is a location on the board, on which all of that lovely money piles up – until someone robs him and takes it all. Players are also hiring various specialists to help them construct buildings like fortresses, gambling dens, and even a few nice places. And along the way, players who haven’t tanked their reputation too much are collecting materials to donate to the building of the cathedral in exchange for rewards and reputation. Architects is mostly a Euro, but there are enough interactions (see “arresting other players’ workers”, above) that even some die-hard Ameritrash devotees might like it. I liked it enough to buy it.