From: "David I. Finberg" Subject: Age Of Renaissance (review) (long) (updated) Well, I guess I will jump into the discussion as well. I played it this weekend, one sample game where we got many of the rules wrong, and then a more complete one where we got most of them straightened out. I will try to give the factual comments first, then my opinions later. First, the components are beautiful. Lots of color, even a color replay of the first few turns of a game in the rulebook. The map is well defined, pretty to look at. Play: From 3 - 6 players, we played with 4. The number of players will hugely change the game, as areas of the board are off limits with fewer than 6 players. Order of turn : 0) buy tokens 1) Draw card 2) Play cards 3) Upkeep (buy advances, pay for cards in hand, buy shipping, etc...) 4) Movement 5) Income 6) go to 0. All play is sequential in phases, and play order is determined by tokens (see below). Tokens : At the start of each turn, each player buys tokens from cash in hand. The player who buys the fewest goes first in each phase (for that turn), second fewest second, ... ties are broken by who picked country last at the start of the game. This tie-breaker can be fairly important, but if people bid the same at the start it is resolved by a die roll then. Events : Instead of being dealt cards for the number of cities you have (as in Civ), each player is given cards at the start of the turn (you may also have opportunities to acquire them later). These cards include commodities, disasters, and leaders. Advances : As in Civ, there are many Civ advances. These allow play advantages (such as buying an extra event card, moving by sea, discarding cards, ...). Cards are played by each player. If a player plays a commodity, payouts are triggered in that commodity. Payouts are same as in Civ (k*n^2). However, payouts are for all people. Thus, you often have commodities you do not wish to play (since other players have that good and you do not). To counteract this, players must pay for the cards left in their hands after the cards phase. Movement : As in Civ, each player is trying to build cities. These cities are located on provinces which correspond to particular goods. Movement is simple (move to an adjacent province), with advances changing this. Also, there is a shipping capacity for each nation that can be used to move by sea. This is acquired through advances and/or buying it. Income : Each player receives money from the bank proportional to the number of cities they have. This is far more than what commodities will typically pay out at the start of the game. Okay, that is a very rough sketch. Now I will fill in with some notes. First, the rules are not the greatest. Written in a far less structured fashion than the typical AH game, the do not answer every question. And the seem to suggest things but not always explicitly state them. For example, Discounts from advances do not apply for a turn, but bonuses apply immediately. The bonuses part was very unclear from the rules (the discount was explicitly stated). Also, turn order. Since the first player to buy an extra card can do so for 3 tokens, the second 6, ... so if you have nothing to do you want to bid one of these numbers. But ties are broken by initial order, so you may wind up paying a hefty price for choosing your province, never buying on of these cheap cards. This may not be critical, since it really only happens when you have nothing better to do (i.e. poor cards in your hand). Also, many people want to expand into similar areas the first few turns. That tie breaker can be a big advantage, since combat costs a huge number of tokens for an uncertain result. After the first few turns this turns the other way, since money is more plentiful and you wish to go last to protect your territories before card plays the next turn. I am not sure which is more important. There seems to be an element of groupthink involved here. If people typically make large bids, then bidding three (or less) to go at the start is a bad move, since someone might go second with 15 or more tokens. In our games this didn't happen, but it is a real possibility. Definitely a rock paper scissors element to go when you want with a number of tokens you can deal with. Also, Shipping. The shipping track is a 3*4 matrix. By paying 10, you can advance one column to the right (once per turn), and advances move you to the start (i.e. left) of lower rows. The last row represents how many overseas (far east and american) provinces you may control. It wasn't clear from the rules whether you had to pay 10 to advance before you bought advances, or if you could postpone to after. This is critical, since it would allow an extra province when you first bought the higher shipping. It seems you shouldn't be able to, but the turn orders says "do these," not really stating if it has to be in that order. It also seems that this can really hamper some people. Hamburg in a 6 player game can also quickly get to the black sea, but doesn't need sea advances. So instead of paying lots of money to move to the right on the chart, he can save up for shipbuilding and just jump right ahead. Obviously this should be balanced by allowing the people who need to buy ship upgrades better stuff (city sites) to get, but this will not always be true (more later). Events : Events also seemed very random. I started our game with the cloth/wine card (it triggers payout in one, but not both). I bid for spain, got it, took 3 wines on the first turn, turned it in on the second. If I had a clue what I was doing that probably would have been an automatic win. On the other hand, drawing a combat event is fairly useless at the start, plus you have to pay for it in upkeep. What a joy. They are more useful later, but a stone is nearly always useless, while an ivory is very profitable. It seemed to me that events were amazingly unbalanced. Getting a good commodity is worth a ton, while a 10 off leader is nice, but worth little, especially if he doesn't fit your strategy. Commodities are so important since they are only going to be played by the person who is doing well in them. It seems you often move last to take a large number of provinces, then play all your commodity cards. Getting few commodity cards is a recipe for disaster, you will never earn significant extra money. And if you get a bunch of useless cards that really hurts. Combat : As discussed in previous messages, combat is somewhat random. If you beat your turn order on a d6 you win, otherwise you need to roll one higher than your opponent on a d6 each. Going early means you almost always win, but you have few tokens. But you still have a good chance if you go last (40%), so often one player buys 36 tokens and takes huge parts of the board, trying to play a commodity card the next turn. Also, to attack, you need tokens equal to the number of defenders plus the value of the territory. This is to make it more expensive to move last. Misery : An interesting addition to the game. Misery is negative victory points. Not paying for cards in hand, disasters, and religion advances increase your misery. Since you cannot reduce it until you have acquired one advance in every category, your buying must be spread out at first. Otherwise disaster awaits, since the steps on the table increase (10, 20, 30, ... , 100, 125, ... 400, 500, ....). Famine, for example, drives everyone up (more misery) 4 spaces, minus one for each grain. Thus, the person who draws the card may get one less misery space then the others (since he attacks a grain province before he plays it), but at the cost of a useful card. Advances : As in Civ, you want them all. The essential ones are the first two religions, all the commerce, all the shipping. The rest are useful, but seem to be less important. For example, the high art lets you switch your turn order with someone, and provides 100 MR (but probably one 2-3 steps because you cannot reduce more than the number of your advances in the category where you have fewest). The second highest art lets you discard an event card without it taking effect. The high shipping, New world, lets you take provinces in the new world, which have 3 commodities each (there are only two), and reduces your misery one step per turn (in addition to other factors). The two high commerces are mining (for all goods!) and profit (double your cash in hand up to your income total). In other words, don't spend 50 this turn, but take an extra 50 (maybe 60) every turn from now on. Politics : This is a much more political game than Civ. War is essential, and ganging up on the leader is very easy. Especially after shipping advances, there are few provinces that are not coastal (which means they are typically next to only 2-3 other players), all the rest can be attacked by everyone. People have been talking about negotitiation in this as a different model. There are no biding agreements, and cards can not even be shown to other people. So you might negotiatate to play a gold (when you don't have any) if someone else pays you money. This type of interaction would make commodities much less valuable (since you would typically only earn half of the revenue). So much so that after someone announces they have something, you might attack them just to try the "forced trade" approach (if you defeat someone and have a cheap commerce advance, you can give up a card to take one of theirs randomly, if you roll well on a die...). Overall : It seemed okay, but I was hoping for more. Easy to play hit the leader, several players seemed to have worse positions. And because combat is so likely to succeed, you probably want to take the lower percentage and go last, so you don't have the next guy just take it right back away from you. In Civ, negotiation was limited by the truth in trading rules, and interaction by combat was hampered by the board layout. This board encourages fighting, and more importantly, encourages ganging up on the leader. While in Civ it was easy to gang up on someone (can you say trade embargo), this typically hurt your position a fair amount, and defections could be encouraged by the embargoed player. On the other hand, there is no penalty for stomping the leader into the ground in AoR. I wasn't impressed after our game. Maybe I am missing something, but this game is far more political than Civ. It does have commodities and advances, but little else is the same. I hope I have given you some insight. -- Dave *********** David Finberg "We're travelin' maniacs dfinberg@math.mit.edu With our knapsacks on our backs dfinberg@athena.mit.edu We'll leave raisins in our tracks (617)661-0365 From the trail mix in our slacks" - YW&D