Renegade Game Studios Renegade Game Studio | Architects of the West Kingdom | Board Game | Ages 12+ | 1 to 5 Players | 60 to 80 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

The rules are complicated, but the actual gameplay is pretty simple: Just put down one piece and do whatever the location says. You put pieces on the board, collect resources, build structures, and try to earn more victory points than anyone else.

There’s a couple of new player boards in the box too, which offer some new initial setups for players, and breathe a bit of life back into the game if you’ve played it to death already. It also has a couple of other unique abilities to protect it from random chance, namely being able to visit the Black Market or work on the Cathedral regardless of its current Virtue. One of the spaces on the board is a town centre action and it lets players capture groups of workers. It’s not worth much at first, but the value builds quickly and each time you work on it you also score a Reward - generally an extra point of Virtue and some resources.Few games though make you calculate the risk and reward against a pivot point in someone else’s head. Note that in that final round, players can still take the Guildhall action even though all the spaces are filled. Architects of the West Kingdom begins with the first player placing one of their workers onto any space on the board, taking the requisite action. The artwork is a bit too angular and caricature-like for me – the people look a little weird – but I have found that I’m in the minority here.

You have to discard 1x Building card (from your ha It’s not all plain sailing though, as the other architects (your rival players) are out to do the same. It so violently reminded me of Raiders of the North Sea that I thought I’d fallen for the board game equivalent of a Unity asset flip. In Architects of the West Kingdom, visit the Town Centre and pay 1x silver (to Tax) to capture opponents’ workers! Architects of the West Kingdom represents the start of a second series of games, (The West Kingdom Trilogy).While the game is the lightest of the West Kingdom trilogy, it does offer a decent challenge (more on that later). Perhaps what is most unusual is that the bot player is it can be used for a two-player game as well, creating a third player to act as an antagonist and additional blocking player, which I think is great! If you choose to build part of the Cathedral, pay the costs for the next step as shown on the board and then move your marker into a free space at that level. Architects is a new entrant in the Worker Placement genre, and it brings a few new ideas to the table which I have found interesting to explore. I’m with Alan on this… Calculating when to make your move with regards to capturing your own and other players ‘ meeples, sending those to prison for money and then triggering a Black Market Reset is part and parcel of the fun here… That said, with higher player numbers the building count can go up very quickly, meaning it feels like the game has stopped too soon and the interplay of prison interaction never really gets a chance to do more than scratch a surface itch.