7 Wonders: Architects

8th December 2021

The next game of Wednesday afternoon gaming on Board Game Arena was 7 Wonders: Architects, which is essentially a 'spin-off' of and at least a little thematically similar to the titular 7 Wonders drafting game.

Like it's ancestor, 7 Wonders: Architects is all about building one of the world's great wonders and no doubt dabbling in science, politics, religion and warfare while doing it.

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Caveat: We've only played this game digitally.

What's in a game?
In the physical game, when players are given/choose wonders to build, they are given that wonder's 'tray'' containing the relevant components for that wonder. However, none of this appears in the digital version

• Wonder: As you would expect, each of the game's 7 wonders is depicted on a set of 5 double-sided tiles which when put together will display the wonder. one side of each tile shows the wonder under construction and the other side the wonder completed.
• Wonder deck: Each of the game's 7 Wonders also comes with its own deck of cards.
• Common deck: This is the game's 8th and final deck.
• Tokens: 7 Wonders: Architects uses quite a few tokens.
  Progress tokens: These green tokens confer benefits or bonuses on the controlling player during the game, or even victory points.
  Conflict tokens: These are used to track the outbreak of war, they have a peace side and a battle side.
  Military victory tokens: These tokens are gained when winning wars.
• Cat pawn: Meow!

The artwork used throughout 7 Wonders: Architects is very similar to the original game which is both understandable and also pretty good, there's a nice variety of colourful illustration used throughout the cards.

The same is true of the game's iconography, it looks identical to 7 Wonders and just like 7 Wonders, there's a lot of it. Most of it is pretty straightforward but players will invariably turn to the rules for an explanation from time-to-time.

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3 wonders are under construction.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Wonders: Each player takes a wonder. All players should put together their wonder with all the 'under construction' sides up.
• Cards: The common deck should be shuffled into a face-down stack and placed in the central playing area.
  Player decks: Each player should shuffle their own deck and place it face-up between themselves and the player to their left. Thus all players should have a deck to their left and to their right.
• Progress tokens: Shuffle the progress tokens into a face-down stack and deal 3 face-up into the central playing area.
• Conflict tokens: Put out a number of conflict tokens according to the number of players, these should all be put with the peace side face-up.
• 1st player: Determine a starting player.

There's some other trivial setup to complete, but otherwise, we're good to go.

On to play
Play in 7 Wonders: Architects is pretty straightforward with the active player taking their turn before play proceeds to the player on their left.

• Cat Pawn: There a several ways for a player to acquire the cat pawn and it can changes hand several times over the course of a game. If a player has the cat pawn during their turn, then they can peek under the top card in the common deck.
• Draw Card: The active player must draw a card from either of the face-up decks to their left and right, or draw blindly from the common deck (Unless they have the cat pawn.), they then put the card in front of them face-up and if necessary, resolve it as explained further below.
  There are several types of card:
  Blue cards: These cards provide straight up victory points. They remain with the player until the endgame
  Green cards: These are the scientific progress cards and come in 3 types. When a play acquires a identical pair or a set of all 3 types, they must discard those cards and draw a progress token.
  Grey cards: These are the game's resources and come in 5 types that will be familiar to players of the original 7 Wonders. Players keep hold of resources until they have acquired the specified amount to build one of the tiles in their wonder. When this is the case, they must discard the relevant resources and build that tile.
  Red cards: As players of the original will know, red cards are military cards. These cards will contain a sword-and-shield symbol which represents military strength and possibly 1 or 2 horns which represent - for lack of a better term, aggression.
  When a player acquires, if it has any horns, then they turn over that many conflict tokens from peace to battle side. If all the conflict tokens are flipped to the battle side then you get war.
  Yellow cards: Gold! That's what yellow cards represent. They can be used as any type of resource with regards to building a wonder, as with resources, they must be used when possible and are discarded when used.
• Progress tokens: When a player takes a progress token due to discarding science cards, they can choose to take any of the available face-up tokens or can draw blindly from the stack.
• Building a wonder: When a player has to discard resources to build part of their wonder, they must start at the bottom and work upwards. Additionally, if they have more than 1 tile which require identical resources, they can choose which tile to build.
  Building a tile means flipping it over to its constructed side, generally this will also confer some kind of benefit on the player.
• War: What is good for? The answer is... apparently victory tokens.
  If at the end of any player's turn, all the conflict tokens are on the battle side, then you get war.
  When war breaks out, each player compares their military strength with that of their 2 neighbours. If the player's military strength is higher than their neighbour's, they get a military victory token, thus it's possible for a player to gain 2 of these during war.
  Once war has been resolved, 2 events occur; firstly flip all the conflict tokens back to the peace side, secondly, all red cards with horns must be discarded by all players.
• Next player: Once all cards and associated actions have been resolved, the player to the left becomes the active player.

Endgame
The endgame is triggered at the end of any player's turn when the 5th tile for their wonder is flipped, thus completing it.
Points come from a variety of sources.
Wonder: Flipped tiles on wonders can provide points.
Blue cards: All blue cards score victory points.
Military victory tokens: These tokens contribute victory points.
Progress tokens: These tokens may provide bonus victory points.
Cat pawn: Whoever possess the cat pawn at the game end will earn a small amount of victory tokens.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
It's quite impressive how the 7 Wonders: architects manages to distil so much of its parent game into this simpler product and I also like how the mechanic for flipping the wonder tiles works but I'm going to go ahead and say it; I'm pretty certain that I'm not the target audience for 7 Wonder: Architects. It feels a little like a 'entry-level' game that I found a little too shallow.

When it comes to a players turn, they are fundamentally only given 3 choices.
Take a face-up card from the left, take a face-up card from the right or take a face-down (Unless you have the cat pawn of course.) card from the central area and that's it.
​I suppose that it can force players to adapt, recognise and try to exploit the available cards to their fullest advantage but I feel that the game lacks the flexibility to see this through, there's no synergy between different card types and all of this makes it hard to create any sense of strategy during the game.
In fact, it feels that strategy is reduced to pick a path to victory and hope that the cards which support that strategy appear. That meant it felt my choices had little significance beyond their immediate benefits.

So, if I'm not the target audience for 7 Wonders: Architects, who is? Casual or light gamers? It strikes me that the rules have enough complexity to not be immediately accessible and the game's usage of iconography only compounds this - experienced gamers will be used to this, but casuals gamers, not so much.
I Feel the game sort of straddles a strange middle ground between rules complexity and light gameplay which is the opposite of what you want and makes it less accessible to casual gamers and less compelling to more dedicated gamers.