First Impression: League of Six

By W. Eric Martin
September 27, 2007

Publisher: Czech Games Edition
Designer: Vladimir Suchy
Players: 3-5
Ages: 12+
Playing Time: 60-90 minutes
Release Date: October 2007

Game Played: Pre-production copy
Number of Plays: Twice, once each with 3 and 4 players

If you had to classify League of Six, that would be a tough job—because you probably haven’t played the game. I have, though, and League of Six strikes me as a great example of an efficiency game, a term I use for games like Caylus and Notre Dame to describe a player’s need to squeeze out an advantage on each move. Efficiency games require players to make dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of little decisions over the course of the game, and the player who has accrued small advantages over his or her opponents will usually end up with the larger pile of points or money and win the game.

The title, League of Six, refers to six wealthy towns in Upper Lusatia that worked together in the 15th century to improve their commercial interests and keep order in a region beset by Hussite attacks. You enter the game in the modest role of a tax collector, traveling from town to town to collect and deliver goods to the court of Sigismund.

The six towns are arranged around a central hexagon that both tracks player order and shows the order of the six phases in each round. As you might expect from the repeated presence of a certain number, the game lasts six rounds. At the start of each round, a number of towns are randomly taken out of play—curse those Hussites!—so that there are as many towns as the number of players. In the center of each town is a hexagon (of course) that features one or more objects on each side: goods (which come in four types), guards, and horses. In the center of each town, a different tax tile is placed each turn; these hexagonal tiles have two to five arrows, and when placed in the center of the town point to the items available in the town. The tax tiles also depict goods, guards, horses, or civic leaders in the center of the tile.

After a set-up phase at the start of each round, players take turns choosing towns at which to collect taxes. The first player to enter a town must bid zero guards. Any player that subsequently enters that town must bid one or more guards; the player who was already in the town may bid more guards or leave, taking the bid number of guards from the winning bidder to escort him to another town. This bidding and moving process continues until each player stands in a separate town.

After rearranging the player order based on the bidding results, players then take turns collecting goods. You can rotate the tax tile within a town to collect whichever items you think will serve you best: Guards allow you bidding power while claiming a town; goods will be handed over to the royal or civic stores, netting you points and possibly a bonus; horses determine the player order for the last part of the round.

Once everyone has levied taxes, the player with the most horses chooses one of eight rows in the royal or civic stores; each row depicts 2-5 goods in some combination of colors. That player must store as many goods as he can in this row, scoring 1-3 points for each good placed. (The number of points is shown above each good.) Then in clockwise order, other players must add goods to the row, filling all open spots if possible; they likewise score 1-3 points for each good placed. If the row is filled, the player who chose the row receives a bonus: 2-5 points if the row is in the royal store and a civic leader card if the row is in the civic store.

The player with the secondmost horses chooses another row, and the row-filling process continues until all players have stored their goods. A clean-up phase follows, then you start the next round.

With every decision over the course of six rounds, you’re trying to gain an incremental advantage over opponents:

• You have to spend guards when moving from town to town, for example, so you need to weigh the loss of a guard against the potential benefits of taxing a more lucrative town.

• When you outbid someone in a town, you’re giving her guards that can be used against you in the future—possibly even the same turn as she can enter a bidding war in another town, collect more guards, and head back to harass you.

• When you’re deciding what to take in taxes, you have to consider what other players have already taken or might be able to take. The value of goods, which can’t be saved from one round to the next, changes each round as the game includes six double-sided store cards with different combinations of goods and points in each row. While the range of points is small, every point matters.

• Possibly more important than the goods are the horse totals since the player with the most horses decides which row to fill in the vault. Even if this player contributes nothing to the row, he scores a bonus if the row is filled. At the same time, this player is probably wrecking the holdings of everyone else and forcing them to score fewer points than they possibly could.

• When you have multiple rows that can be filled, you have to weigh the benefits of completing a royal or civic row. Completing a royal row gives you 2-5 points straight up; completing a civic row lets you draw a face-up bonus card depicting 2-5 civic leaders.

• The civic leaders come into play at the end of the game. After the sixth round, players reveal their leader cards, and players compare totals in the three types of figures: clergy, aristocracy, and burghers. (Or as I like to call them: brown, green and purple.)

  For each type of leader, 9 points are scored by the player holding the most, 6 points for the player in second, 4 points for third, and 2 points for fourth. All of these leaders are gained openly, then concealed in the hand, so you could track everyone’s totals is you felt ambitious. (Guard totals are also concealed yet trackable, although the totals aren’t hard numbers since players can spend two points whenever needed to purchase a guard.)

Your goal, naturally, is to figure out which combination of scoring methods will work best for you given the specific circumstances in your game. The town tiles are even reversible, so that’s yet another changing element that you can throw in the mix. Each round, you have to evaluate how valuable the horses—that is, the ability to choose which rows receive goods—will be. In that three-player game, for example, I took the horse majority in the final round and stripped goods away from others, so that I scored a bonus and they scored fewer points. At the same time, in order to take horses I couldn’t take any goods, so I earned only the bonus during that round. Without guards, you’ll be bullied from town to town, but how many guards is enough?

You have tons of information that could affect each decision, and all of it is either open or trackable, so I will never play League of Six with certain people because the game would take hours. While I’m not adverse to a bit of calculation, I prefer to play by instinct and not cycle through every possible play each turn. If you do, more power to you and I hope your game group feels likewise or doesn’t have sharp objects within reach.

As for the physical design of the game, consider these comments to be written in erasble ink as I played on a pre-production copy. The board layout works nicely, especially the phase reminder within the central hexagon that uses arrows to lead you through the order of play. The artwork and detail of the design is impressive; each good looks like a different colored gem, for example, but when you look at them more closely, you see that the sapphire is actually fabric, the emerald is food, and so on.

It’s easy to miss seeing such details, however, as the components are all on the small side. The civic leader cards, the tax tiles, the guard spaces under the towns—everything is 25% too small, which gives some players trouble when leaning across the board. The clean-up and set-up phases are somewhat fiddly as you have a half-dozen things to do and many of them involve small parts.

The bottom line: If you like efficiency games, you’ll probably enjoy League of Six. You’ll find lots of small elements to ponder during the course of play, and the game feels different with differing numbers of players. With four players, for example, more goods and more guards entered the game, so the bids were higher when competing for towns—similar to how bidding in Amun-Re is more dynamic with more players—and the value of the goods felt different while filling the royal and civic stores. If you’re not a fan of this type of game, League of Six has everything you don’t like and probably won’t change your mind.

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