Patrick Korner: A New Beginning / City & Guilds

Hey hey hey!

Well, it certainly has been a long time since I last sent my thoughts out into cyberspace, hasn’t it?  Let’s see what all has changed in the last month:

Back then: Caylus heavily hyped.

Now: Um, never mind.

Back then: Colts undefeated.

Now: Um, never mind.

Back then: My weblog appeared on gamewire.

Now: Hey, something that DID change!  As you can tell, I’ve jumped on board Rick’s ship of fools and am now coming at you in 500 watts of pure, bass-thumbing BGN power!  What, there’s no theme music to this site yet?  Rick, oh, Rick, something to work on… Someone get Beatnik Turtle on the phone!  What, that’s already been done?  Crap.

Anyhoo, glad to be here and glad to see that Rick hasn’t missed a beat when it comes to purveying the finest that the boardgaming world has to offer news-wise.  I’m especially glad to see the international line-up – it will be very interesting to see what’s cooking in other parts of the world, especially those that we don’t usually hear much about over here in North America.

So, what to write about this time?  Well, I got my passel of games from Rick, who kindly brought them back from Essen for me – thanks again Rick!  I haven’t had the chance to try all of them out yet (you know how hard it is to find time to play a game some days?  Now try finding time to read the rules on top of that), but I did manage to play City & Guilds, a JKLM release from 2004, twice now.  So, some thoughts on the game:

City & Guilds could be characterized as “Carcassonne on Steroidsâ€?, but that would actually be a bit of a disservice, as the game’s quite good and more than capable of standing on its own without needing pithy comparisons to well-known titles.  (Quick aside: I really dislike those kinds of off-the-cuff reviews.  Game X?  It’s the new Game Y.  Oh really?  Then I needn’t bother playing it, right?).  Sadly, I think it’s been somewhat overlooked for two reasons: 1) It’s overshadowed by Kogge, JKLM’s ‘better known’ release, and 2) the original rules were somewhat difficult to follow and understand.  The game’s not tricky, but the rules sure made it seem that way.

City & Guilds is a tile-laying game at its simplest level.  There are four guild colours, and there are building and market tiles for all four.  In addition, there are a few special tiles – minstrel houses and taverns, which do not have a guild affiliation.  Players have a ‘hand’ of three tiles to choose from on their turn, and must place 1 tile onto the board.  Then they gain the influence that the tile affords them and re-draw a new tile from three face-up options on the table.  There, that’s the sum total of a player’s turn.  Wow, pretty tricky, eh?

The tricky bit isn’t in the rules; rather, it’s in the way the game fits together and the decisions that need to be made when choosing what tile to place where.  The board has eight city blocks shown, and your tile must go onto a free space in one of those blocks – there are eight spaces per block, by the way.  Optimal placement depends on what you’re trying to do as well as what kind of tile you’re placing.  When you place a building, you have a choice: You can either put two of your men on it (signifying ownership of the tile), or you can put a single man on and move yourself up one space on the investment track that suits the guild colour you just played.  When you place a market, it’s pretty simple: you just get 2 moves up the investment track.

Overall block control depends on which player own the most tiles there – but ties are sorted out by the number of men (which is why placing 2 is sometimes useful).  But then, increasing your guild investment is also a good thing, since it determines who gets points from the guilds themselves.  And since there’s both block scoring and guild scoring, you have to decide which you need more at the moment… One interesting thing about this game is that there are no ties, ever: there’s a tiebreak for everything, often being who got there first (a mechanic also seen in last year’s Tahuantinsuyu from Hangman Games).

When the last tile in a block is placed, the block gets scored.  The block value depends on how many markets and/or minstrel houses / taverns are in it, with the player who’s in first for this block getting half the block value, rounded up.  Second gets half of first’s score, and third gets half of second’s score – all rounded up.  Then, the guild for the block scores – the tiles are checked to see which guild has the biggest presence there.  Whoever has the highest investment in the winning guild gets 4 points – second gets 2 and third gets 1.  One last detail – the player who placed the last tile in the block gets to place a tavern tile on the board (the minstrel houses are part of the usual tile draw, but you only get taverns by forcing scoring).

At the end of the game, there’s a final scoring phase that deals with how many men each player has left off the board as well as guild chains.  The men scoring is simple: you lose 1 point for each man you didn’t place during the game.  The guild chains are a little more involved:  Each guild is checked to see how long its longest chain is.  A chain is a set of connected tiles – and here it’s important to know that any two tiles that don’t have another tile between them are considered adjacent, even if they’re in two separate blocks!  So a guild chain can span multiple blocks, and indeed the guild chain scoring is heavily dependent on how many blocks the chain spans.  The value of each chain is the number of tiles that make it up plus a pre-set amount that depends on how many blocks the chain spans.  Points for first, second and third are dealt with in the same manner as the blocks were during the game itself.

So really, the game’s a quick brain-teaser that, with three or four players, takes about 45 minutes to an hour and makes you try and think about various things.  Do you try and ensure that you get block control?  Or ignore some blocks and gun for chains?  Do you place to try and cut off a guild chain in a colour you know you’ll be weak in at the end?  Or place to enhance your own?  I find myself doing a lot of thinking between turns, calculating how much a block will probably be worth and whether it’s worth fighting for.  Sometimes getting third place isn’t so bad – a 12-point block gets the third place player 2 points compared to second place’s 3 – not a big difference, really.

The only thing I’m finding about the game is that there are times when you’re desperate for a building tile to come up in the draw area because you really, really need to add men to the board – and you have nothing but markets to choose from, turn after turn.  I’d almost be tempted to add a house rule that allows you to choose from the 3 face up AND 1 face-down (that you’re then obligated to play, of course), to try and ensure that people don’t get screwed by the tile distribution too much.  But then, after 2 plays I can’t say I know enough about the game to make this change just yet!

Overall I’m pretty happy with it, though – it was a little pricy, to be sure, but it’s a good game that I look forward to playing again, especially once several of us have gotten the strategy down a little more.

And that about wraps it up for my very first BGN column.  Next week, I’ll talk about how to host a successful game day (hint: make sure nobody you invite has a website to finish building!).

‘till then!

pk

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