2nd May 2022

It's a bank holiday Monday and we're round Simon's for some gaming fun.

Waterdeep, famed city in The Forgotten Realms and home to many a adventurer, ready to brave the wilderness in the search for treasure and glory... oh wait... This Dungeons & Dragons setting licensed game is nothing to do with Dungeon & Dragons... It's actually a political-intrigue themed worker placement game!

What's in the game?

• Game board: The board shows a map of the titular city; Waterdeep in some detail.
  Buildings: There 9 basic worker-spaces dedicated the various 'buildings' and establishments throughout the city, such as the Blackstaff Tower and The Grinning Lion Tavern.
  Some spaces such as the Cliffwatch Inn and Builder's Hall have additional spaces associated with them (To place certain types of cards basically.).
  Building sites: There are also 9 blank spots which can have buildings constructed upon them during the course of the game.
  Card spaces: There are spaces for the quest deck & discard pile, intrigue deck and discard pile as well as the the deck of building tiles.
  Round tracker: Lord of Waterdeep is played over 8 rounds, this is tracked with VP tokens - which are then introduced into the game over each round. More on this below.
  Agent tracker: Players gain an additional worker halfway through the game, their workers are kept here until acquired.
  Scoring track: Finally, there's a scoring track which runs the perimeter of the board.
• Player mat: There is a player mat in each of the 5 player colours. Each mat represents a different faction active within Waterdeep, the City Watch or the Harpers for example.
  Mats contain spaces to put acquired resources such as cubes, money or agents. There are also allotted spots to place active and completed quest card and to place a player's Lord card.
• Agent meeples: These come in each player and are the game's workers. Additionally, there is a ambassador and lieutenant meeple which may come into play.
• Adventurers: Represented by little wooden cubes, these are recruits that players will be... err... recruiting to their cause to complete quests.
  There are 4 colours of cube representing clerics, fighters, rogues and magic-users. What, no demi-humans!
• Cards: Lord of Waterdeep makes uses of several types of cards.
  Lord cards: These are the Lords of Waterdeep, the secret rules or the city. There are 11 lord cards and each player will secretly be playing one of them. Lord cards feature some flavour text and a method for earning additional VPs.
  Quest cards: Questing is an important part of Lord of Waterdeep. Quest cards contain illustrations and some flavour text. Each quest card also has a cost to complete, typically it will be a number of adventurers such as 3 fighters and 2 rogues and so on, the cost may include money too
  Each quest also associated with 1 of 5 types such as Warfare or Skulduggery. This also determines which type of adventure it primarily needs.
  Intrigue cards: When played, intrigue provide the controlling player with a once-only benefit of some sort.
• Building tiles: These extra buildings which can be constructed and placed on the boards blank building sites for the listed cost in coins. The provide players with extra locations to place workers and new benefits which can be earned. Any player put a worker there but be warned, the builder gets a benefit whenever another player makes use of their building.
  These tiles are sort of square shaped but with an indentation in 1 corner - which is where players' building control marker goes. (More on markers below.)
• Tokens: The game also makes use of various card tokens.
  Victory points: These hexagonal tokens display what appears to be a ruby.
  Building control marker: These come in the 5 different player colours, when a player constructs a building, they put their marker on the corner of the tile.
  Gold: The game uses curiously shaped square and crescent tokens to represent gold. I guess that's what coins look like in Waterdeep.
  First player marker: This token looks a bit like the rook from a chess set and represents Castle Waterdeep.

For the most part, all the components felt sturdy and well made. The player mats felt a little thin and flimsy but that's probably down to the fact they're quite large and will be perfectly find unless mistreated.

​There's a lot of excellent art throughout the game. I'm not sure if it's been created specifically for Lords of Waterdeep or sourced from the large amount of Forgotten Realms/D&D artwork that's been produced over the decades but either way, it's good quality and generously used on all the game's cards.
The other piece of significant artwork is the map on the board, it's very well detailed, although it does make the board look a little 'busy'. Regardless of this I still quite like it.

The game does use a fair amount of iconography, for the vast majority of icons, it's pretty clear what they mean and there was minimal need to refer to the rules.

How's it play?
Setup

• Player mats: Randomly deal a player mat to each player. This will be that player's faction/colour for the game.
  Also give each player a number of meeples/agents as per player count and building control markers, all  in their player colour.
  Finally put 1 meeple of each player colour on the agent track.
• Lords of Waterdeep: Shuffle the Lord cards into a face-down deck, deal 1 face-down to each player and discard the rest out of the game. Player's should keep the identity of their lord secret, there's a space to put it under their player mat.
• Board: Put out the game board and do the following.
  Quest deck: Shuffle the quest cards into a face-down deck then deal 4 face-up on to their allotted spaces above the Cliffwatch Inn.
  Building tiles: Shuffle the building tiles into a face-down stack, deal 3 face-up on to the allotted spaces adjacent to the Builder's Hall.
  Intrigue cards: Shuffle the intrigue cards into a face-down deck and place them on their allotted space. Then deal 2 intrigue cards to each player face-down.
  Victory point tokens: Put 3 VP tokens on to each of the 8 round tracking spaces.
• First player: Determine a starting player, that player gets 4 gold, each subsequent player then gets 1 more gold than the previous player. Thus for a 5 player game, the starting gold will go from 4-8 gold.

On to play
Lords of Waterdeep uses the traditional turn structure with the active player taking an action and play progressing to their left.
When someone is the active player, they can act in 2 phases.
Firstly they must take their action, a player can only pass when they have no more agents to play.
finally, the active player may complete a quest if possible.

• Round start: At the start of the first and every following round, take the 3 VP tokens and place 1 each on the three building tiles available to buy.
• Place worker: A player action will involve placing one of their agents on to a space on the board and resolving that space. Several spaces will devoted to acquiring resources, others however, will have more specific actions.
  • Acquire resource: A number of the spaces will simply acquire 1 or more of the games 5 main resources (4 adventurer types and gold.) for the player when they place their worker there. I.e., going to the arena will recruit fighters, going to the tavern will recruit rogues and so forth.
    When resources are acquired, they are placed on to the player's mat.
  • Builder's Hall: If a worker is placed here, then the active player chooses one of the 3 available advanced buildings and pays its cost. The building is then placed into the blank building sites. Finally, the active player puts one of their building control markers in the appropriate slot.
    When a advanced building is drafted from the builder's hall, it is immediately replaced with a new building tile.
    Advanced buildings: there are numerous different types of advanced building that can come into play. Each one provides an extra space to place a worker and will provide the player who built it with a benefit whenever another player uses the building.
  • Castle Waterdeep: When a player puts a worker here, they gain the first player marker for the following round. Additionally, they also draw an intrigue card.
  • Cliffwatch Inn: There are actually 3 spaces here.
    First space: This allows the active player to take a face-up quest card then put it on the active quest area adjacent to their player mat and take 2 gold
    Second space: This allows the active player to take a face-up quest card then put it on the active quest area adjacent to their player mat and draw an intrigue card.
    Third space: With this action, all the currently face-up quest cards are discard and are replaced with 4 more, then the active player takes 1 of them.
    Whenever a quest card is taken, it is immediately replaced.
    Quest cards: When a player gains a quest card, it placed along the left-hand edge of their player mat; until it is completed, it has no function.
  • Waterdeep Harbour: This spot also has 3 spaces.
    Each time a player places a worker here, they may immediately play one of their intrigue cards.
    A player may put multiple agents here but is still limited to playing 1 agent per turn.
    Intrigue card: When an intrigue card is played, it is immediately resolved and discarded.
    There are several types of intrigue card which may benefit whoever plays it or hinder another.
• Complete quest: ​After the active player has placed and resolved one of their workers, they may spend resources on their mat to complete one active quest per turn.
  Once a quest is completed, it grants a reward, this may be a once-only or ongoing benefit. Quests with on-going benefits are known as plot-quests and may provide extra places to put workers.
  When a quest is completed, it's VPs are immediately scored.
  Mandatory quests: These quests are not acquired the usual way, they come from intrigue cards and are actually played on other players. If a player receives a mandatory quest, it must be completed before they complete any other quest.
• Next player: Once a player has put a worker into play and chosen to complete a quest or not, play progresses to the player on their left.
• Next round: When all players have placed all their workers, the current round ends and play progresses to the next round. The VP tokens on the new round's spot on the round tracker are placed on the 3 available building tiles.
  It is possible for a building to have more than 1 VP token if it wasn't built in the previous round.
  5th Round: At the start of the 5th round, each player acquires an additional agent/worker they can use for the rest of the game.

Endgame
The game ends at the end of the 8th round and goes to final scoring. VPs come from the follwing sources.

• Score on the score tracker.
• Every agent/worker a player has on their mat earns them an additional VP.
• Every 2 gold a player has on their mat earns them a VP.
• Lord cards will score VPs according to their individual quest objectives.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Now, I'm by no means whatsoever particularly knowledgeable about the Forgotten Realms setting but it's quite impressive how Lords of Waterdeep manages to marry a worker placement game with the flavour of the setting, or at least a part of it that takes place in Waterdeep. It's not vital to the rules or gameplay but conversely, neither is it jarring or hindering.

The game is all about optimising actions to gain required resources as efficiently as possible to complete quests which must also be acquired while at the same time trying to predict and out manoeuvre other players: Most of the locations that confer resources will only have space for a single worker, making it unlikely that players will get all the resources they want in a single round, prioritising is very important because completing quests is very important, not only do quests provide VPs, they can confer useful benefits as well.

This ties in with the Lord cards which are essentially secret objectives.
Not only may players be competing for certain quest types and their respective resources, there's also a higher level of play where resources and quests can be denied to other players, provided their objectives can be guessed of course.

The advanced buildings is an interesting proposition, it adds an element of emergent strategy to the game, changing the status quo, giving players new options and making them re-asses their plans. Constructing a useful building also has the benefit of earning the builder its bonus and inevitably, it'll be used by other players.

There's not much else to say really, the gameplay is solid if somewhat unremarkable; players of worker placements games will find themselves on familiar ground here which may or may not be good thing - depending on your mileage.
Perhaps the playing time is a touch too long for what it is but none of this stops Lords of Waterdeep from ultimately being an enjoyable game.

If the Forgotten Realms setting doesn't put you off for some reason and you want to try a worker placement game, then Lords of Waterdeep is probably worth a look.

1st May 2022

It's a Sunday and we're logged into Board Game Arena for an evening of gaming.

Azul; not a game about a villainous god-entity from Ghostbusters but actually a game about creating mosaic, decorative wall patterns with multi coloured tiles.
My friend's a plasterer, wonder if he'd be good at this!

Caveat: We've only ever played Azul digitally.

What's in a game?

• Player board: The player boards are double-sided with different shapes on both sides. Most of each player board is taken up by two sets of grids.
  Pattern lines: The left hand grid is a sort of triangular shape composed of rows of squares. The top row has 1 square and each row below increases the count of squares by 1. Thus the 5th and final row consists of 5 squares. These lines are known as the pattern lines
  Wall: The right hand grid is a 5x5 size with coloured/patterned squares. There are 5 types of square and each row has one of each type. Additionally, going downwards, each row has those types of square in a slightly offset position so they appear to 'descend' diagonally. The relationship between the 2 types of grid is key to the game. The wall is where players score VPs.
  Floor line: Along the bottom of the player board is a row of spaces labelled with minus values, e.g., -1, -2 and up to -3.
  Score tracker: Finally, along top of each board is an individual scoring tracker for each player.
• Token mats: There are 9 of these mats and they are each decorated in elaborate swirling patterns.
• Token/tiles: There are 100 tokens which represent the game's wall tiles, 20 each in 5 types with patterns that match the patterns on the square grid on player boards.
  First player token: There is also a first player token, it has no intrinsic value and will actually cost players VPs!
• Bag: The physical game comes with a bag which is used to blindly draw tokens.

The game's only artwork are the patterns which appear on the tokens. It does it's job though, between bright colours and unique images, the 5 sets of tokens look distinctive from one another.

Azul doesn't make use of icons and the relationship between tokens and a player board is clear.

How's it play?
Setup

• Board: Give each player a board.
• Mats: Put out 5-9 mats in a circular shape according to player count. Then place the first player token in the central area between the mats. All of this constitutes the game's drafting area.
• Tokens: Put all of the tokens into the bag and give it a good shake.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Azul, the player's objective is to place tokens on to their respective spots on the wall grid of their player board, which scores them VPs.
This is done by filling in the horizontal lines in the pattern lines grid; players must collect tokens of the type they need and place them in the spaces on the respective horizontal line. Depending on the line, it will require 1-5 tokens to fill a line. When a line is filled, one of those tokens can be placed in the matching space on that line at the end of the round.
All tokens will score 1 or more VPs when placed, tokens can also score again at the game end.

Azul makes use of a traditional turn order, with the active player performing their action (Which will involve taking 1 or more tokens of the same type.) before play progresses to the player on the left.

• Round start: The first player should blindly draw tokens from the bag and place them on the mats until each mat has 4 tokens on it. With 5-9 mats there will be 20-36 tokens used.
• Collect tokens: The active player must draft tokens from one of the mats or the central area (At the game start there won't be anything in the central area to draft.).
  The player chooses which type of token to draft and must take all the tokens of that type from the chosen mat or central area.
  From mat: If the tokens are drafted from a matt, the any tokens remaining on that matt are moved into the central area.
  From centre: If tokens are drafted from the central area and the first player token is also there, then that is taken as well.
  The first player token cannot be played into the lines and instead goes into the floor line. It means that the player will go first in the next round but will lose a point as a consequence.
• Place tokens: Now the active player must place their tokens into the pattern lines grid on their player board. There are several restrictions here.
  • Tokens can only be placed into a single line.
  • Tokens may be placed into any empty line or a line which already contains matching tokens.
    Any excess tokens remaining after filling a line are sent to the floor line.
  • Tokens cannot be placed in a line already containing different tokens.
  • Tokens cannot be placed in a line where the matching token has already been added to the wall grid. I.e., if a line had been previously filled and emptied of a particular type of token, in essence a line can only be used once for each type of tokens and it cannot be repeated.
  • Finally, the active player may choose to put the tokens into the floor line.
• Next player: Once the active player has placed their tokens, play progresses to the player on the left.
• Round end: Play continues until all the tiles from the drafting area have been placed on to player boards, then the  round is over and the following end of round actions occur for each player:
  • Resolve tokens: A line in the pattern lines which has been filled is considered resolved. This means that one of the tokens from that line is placed on it's corresponding spot on the same row in the wall grid, any remaining tokens are returned to the bag.
  • Scoring tokens: When a token is moved to the wall grid, it is immediately scored. How much it scores will depend on it's position relative to other tokens on the wall grid.
    If the token is not adjacent to any other tokens (The very first token placed on the wall grid for example.), then it scores 1 VP.
    If the token has been placed adjacent to 1 or more other tokens, it forms a link with them and scores more. For each horizontal token it is adjacent to in a link, an additional VP is scored. The same is true for a vertical link.
    If multiple rows were completed in the same round, then multiple tokens can be scored.
  • Floor line: Each token that has been placed in a box in the floor ​line costs the VPs listed, this is cumulative. E.g., the first 4 boxes are 1-, -1, -2, -2, if they are filled, this would total -6 VP. Once penalty points have been calculated, return the first player token to the centre and the other tokens to the bag.
• Next round: Whoever had the first player token is now the first player for the next round which they begin by blindly drawing tokens to populate the mats in preparation for the next round.
  Any uncompleted pattern lines carry over into the following round.
  

​
Endgame
When any horizontal line in the wall grid on any player's board has been filled, the endgame is triggered. The current end of round actions and scoring are completed and the game goes to final, bonus scoring.

Bonus VPs can be scored scored by the following:

• Every filled out vertical line is worth 7 VPs.
• Every filled out horizontal line is worth 2 VPs.
• Every completed set of 5 matching tokens (In other words; each filled out diagonal line.) is worth 10 VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
On a rudimentary level, Azul's mechanics involve drafting handfuls of tokens and then placing them on to a board where their relative positioning scores varying amounts of VPs. It's a mechanic (Or a variation of that mechanic.) that have been employed in several other games and I'd say that Azul is a mid-weight iteration of it. As written the rules feel a little opaque and counter-intuitive but in application, they're pretty straightforward.
Where Azul get its weightiness comes from two areas of the rules; how the drafting - particularly drafting from mats works and then where and when tiles should go on the grids.

​As a basic concept, collecting as many tokens as possible to fill out the pattern lines and consequently get tokens on the wall grid is the way to go. However, there's more to it than.
For example, simply collecting too many tokens can sent the excess to the floor ​line and cost VPs, this is more important than it sounds, because as tokens are taken from the mats, it's inevitable that other tokens will build up in the centre and trying to predict this can be very important. Depending on circumstances, a lot of tokens of a particular type may well build up in the centre.
A player may want 4 red tokens for example, should they try and take them in drips and drabs from several mats over several turns or wait for them to accumulate in the centre? Provided of that they do accumulate in the centre, what if too many go to the centre?
There's definitely a higher level of play where watching what other players are doing is important. Quite often it's clear what they're prioritising, what they want or don't want in the next few turns.
​If they have a single token in the 5-space line on the left, it's likely they'll be looking to fill that out. Conversely, if they've already got 1 or more scoring tokens on the right side, they'll be unlikely or unable to use more of those tokens.
Being able to predict other player's objectives will help when making decisions. It can also allow a player to try and deny tokens to other players and curiously, on some occasions force other players to take tokens they don't want.

Players will also want to think about how and when to place their scoring tokens. Putting them down willy-nilly is a sure way to minimise points.
Obviously in order to optimise points, tokens should ideally be put on to the wall adjacent to other tokens. Placing them vertically is a good way to go, since completed vertical lines earn an additional 7 VPs each, unless a player is looking to end the game, in which case they can go for the horizontal line!

This brings me to an interesting facet in the mechanics, scoring the diagonal, i.e., putting all the tokens of 1 type on to the wall grid scores the biggest bonus; 10 VPs but as they are diagonal, they can't score off of each other! Additionally, once a diagonal of a type has been completed, the player can no longer score tokens of that type at all, collecting those tokens will now just incur penalty points in the floor line. Should a player hold off getting the diagonal until later which lowers the risk of sending tokens to the floor line or wait? Waiting will mean risking not completing it at all.

I have to say I'm not fond of mechanics which lose players points especially if it can occur out of their control, it irritates like a unreachable itch and can be a little stress inducing. I find that's the case with Azul as well. 
However, having said that, the truth is; this is what makes Azul a good game and gives it depth. It means that collecting tokens either earns VPs (Or contributes towards acquiring VPs.) or loses VPs. It's always a meaningful decision.

​Other iterations of these mechanics are a little less stressful, brain-boiling and perhaps more accessible. But if depth is what you're looking along with a dollop indirect interaction between players, then Azul is worth a try.