Scott Tepper: Utopia Review

It’s amazing how easy it is to distract grown men (and occasionally a woman or two, although they tend to be more level-headed in this respect) with a little sparkle.  One can find examples of this sort of misdirected focus anywhere.  When I was in New York City, a woman wearing a tiny sequined dress got out of a cab in Times Square.  As she walked by, I noticed that the gazes of the men with whom she crossed paths were focused not on her eyes, but rather certain parts of her outfit.  Apparently the cosmetics industry similarly believes in this type of allure, as they seem to add glitter or sparkle or shine to just about every product that a woman can put on her body.  The intent, I surmise, is to direct men’s attention to a particular location.

Utopia, the recent offering by Editions du Matagot by Ludovic Vialla and Arnauld Urbon, who were both responsible for Khronos, is made with the same sort of philosophy in mind: A little bit of glitz will make it hard to focus on what a brain-burning game Utopia has the potential to be.  It is impossible, when opening Utopia’s box, to not be stirred by the components.  The first thing you will notice are the 40 monument and 4 wonder figures.  These 1.5” plastic sculptures are so intricately crafted that I found myself turning them over in my hands, marvelling at their construction and wondering how such tiny detail could be crafted in these small, mass-produced figurines.  Also included in the box is a large 20” x 29” gameboard, depicting 4 islands, each divided into several districts, that ensures Utopia cannot be played on a small card table.  For markers on the score track, each player uses a differently colored and shaped Minister figure.  In addition each player also receives 40 circular cardboard Prince tokens (8 of each of the 5 civilizations), 8 square cardboard bases, and 2 privilege tokens in their color.  The 40 larger circular cardboard Guest tokens (2 per civilization for each of the 4 islands on the board) are placed in the included cloth bag, and the 50 Action Cards (10 for each civilization) are shuffled and placed next to the gameboard before the game begins.

The theme of game tells of the Utopian king who has invited princes from the greatest civilizations.  The players are ministers who help guide the invitees to work together to build monuments.  Over time, the importance of different civilizations change.  The player who helps create the most monuments of the civilizations that are in favor at the time will gain the most prestige and win the game.

The setup of the game is rather easy.  The color-coded Prince tokens, bases and and Privilege tokens are distributed to the players.  The players’ score markers are placed on the starting position of the score track in a randomly chosen order.  One of each of the 5 different monument types(Mayan, Persian, Egyptian, Greek and Chinese) are randomly placed on the prestige scale.  This scale assigns a value of 1-5 to each of the civilizations during the game.  The guest tokens are placed in the cloth bag and mixed up.  This may be somewhat difficult to do because the bag is a little small.  Finally, the Action cards are shuffled and placed near the board.

Utopia is played in rounds until one player has enough prestige points to trigger the endgame.  Each round proceeds the same way.  First, Guest tokens are drawn randomly until you have 3 times the number of players.  Each Guest token has a picture of a citizen of one of the 5 civilizations as well as a symbol corresponding to one of the 4 islands on the board.  The Guest tokens are placed by the boat next to the island that matches their symbol.  For example, after the appropriate number of Guest tokens have been drawn, you could have two Persian and one Greek prince next to the Island of Wind(lower right corner).

In the first phase of a round, the arrival of the Princes, the players will, one at a time, remove one of the Guest tokens from the board and place one of their corresponding Prince tokens (matching citizen type) on any of the districts of the appropriate island.  During this phase, or any other of the game, if a player is able to group 3 of their prince tokens of the same nationality together in the same district, the tokens may be removed from the board and replaced with a monument of the appropriate kind(ie. A pagoda for 3 Chinese citizens).  The player who has built the monument puts one of their colored bases underneath it, so that all players will know who built it.  No immediate points are given for the building of a monument.

Also on their turn, if a player has 5 of their Princes, each of a different nationality, anywhere on the same island, the Princes can be removed and one of the 4 wonders can be built on the island.  For having built a wonder, a player immediately receives 6 prestige points.  In addition, whenever any player builds a monument on an island where a Wonder has already been built, the Wonder’s owner receives prestige points equal to the number printed on the new monument’s district(between 1-4).

Turn order in Utopia is handled a little bit differently than most games.  In each round, the player whose scoring marker is currently farthest along the score track takes their turn first.  Then the player in 2nd place takes their turn, etc… This is important because the first player in a round gets first crack at choosing Guest tokens.  However, going first is a disadvantage at the end of the round when scoring occurs.

In the second phase of a round, development of the city, all players are randomly dealt 5 Action Cards, which are simply cards depicting each of the 5 different civilizations.  Then in turn order, the players carry out as many actions using their Action Cards as they so choose.  A player may refrain from using all their cards, but may only carry over a maxium of 5 cards.  Any unused Action cards more than 5 must be discarded from a player’s hand at the end of their turn.

During this second phase the players may:

*Move one or two Princes – by discarding an Action card, a player may move one or two matching Princes from the same district into a neighboring district on the same island, OR move one or two matching Princes from a district that has a port to an adjacent island district that has a port.

*Add a Prince to the board – by discarding an Action card, a player may place one of their matching Prince tokens to the board to any district that has a monument belonging to that civilization.  If the monument/district is controlled by an opponent, then that opponent receives one prestige point.  OR, a player may play 3 of the same Action card to add a one Prince token of the matching type to any district on the board.

*Remove a Prince – by playing an Action card, a player may remove one of their matching Prince tokens from the board if the token resides in a district that contains a monument of that civilization.  The player then receives 2 prestige points.

*Influence the King – by playing an Action card, a player may move the corresponding monument on the prestige scale up one notch.  This will have the side effect of moving a different monument down one notch to fill the empty space.  OR a player may play 2 Action cards of the same type to move the corresponding monument down to the value 1 spot. The other monument are moved up accordingly.

After all players have taken their turns playing action cards, calculation of prestige occurs.  In this phase, the players receive prestige points for each monument they possess based on the prestige scale.  For example, if I have 2 Egyptian monuments and one Greek monument on the board and the Egyptian monuments have a value of 4 and Greek monuments have a value of 1, then I’ll receive 9 prestige points.  If a player reaches 50 or more points in this phase, the game ends at the end of the round.  The player with the most points wins.

So how does the game play?  At its heart, Utopia is really a chess-like abstract game.  Ultimately you’re trying to build monuments and manipulate the value of the monuments so that you can score the most points at the end of each round.  In this respect, turn order is very important because the last person to play in the round will have the last option to manipulate the monument value chart.  Scoring high at the end of a round will push a player ahead on the score track, but will then allow other players to change the value chart before scoring occurs, so timing, or the decision when to pull ahead is important in this game.

While luck seems to be present in Utopia, with the random drawing of the Guest tokens, and random deal of the Action cards, with players have many options to control their position on the board.  The problem is that it can be a little overwhelming to trying and figure out which Guest tokens to choose, and what is the best way to use the Action cards you’re holding.  In this respect, it’s a little surprising how thinky, and abstract strategy-ish Utopia is, given the beautiful components.  Even though the theme seems to fit the game, a few of the actions(adding or removing Princes) are a little difficult to logically work into the story of the game.  It makes sense that the players should be able to find some way to make use of straggler Princes that can’t be made into a monument or wonder, but what happens to them when they are removed from the board in a district with a monument?  Thematically, why should a player gain points for making a Prince disappear?  Overall, I liked Utopia, but it may seem a little overwhelming to the average player, as the values of monuments can wildly change from round to round, giving the illusion that a player in the lead is standing in quicksand.

Utopia Quick Overview
# of players: Good with 3-5
Game duration: 90 minutes (shorter with fewer players)
Effect of Luck: some
Quality of Components: Excellent
Feel of Game: Abstracty

© 2008 Scott Tepper

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Comments:

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Thanks for the good review. I got my copy last week and read through the rules, but didn’t get much of a sense of the game from them. My gaming group has issues with learning new games from scratch, so being able to better explain the game will help me get it to the table. John Posted by John Daniels on Mar 17, 2008 at 12:11 PM | #

Scott; Good review.  I’ve played the game twice, and found the luck element to be a little too overwhelming for my tastes.  Certainly my group agreed - it hasn’t been requested since. The other annoyance is how tiny the guests markers are - hard to scan the board and know what’s arriving, not to mention who has what where and what they may wish to try and accomplish.  I think there’s a relatively thinky game there, as you say, but the components kind of get in the way. pk Posted by Patrick Korner on Mar 17, 2008 at 05:12 PM | #

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