5th February Another Tuesday night at 'The Sovereigns'. The ladies bathroom was closed and most of the pub smelt of poo! But board gamers are a tough as it gets. So we endured and played on. The first game of the night was 'Century: Eastern Wonders'. This is the 3rd 'Century' game I've seen the other two are: Century: Spice Road. Century: Golem Edition. I've played Century: Spice Road previously and it was alright. It was sort of a deck building Resource trading/management card game. But a specifc random element in the game 'Really pisses me off to no end!' But enough talk of a game that I'm not actually blogging about. So Century: Eastern Wonders is a sequel of sorts to Spice Road game and contains rules for combining both games into a single game. Curious - but something for another time. In Eastern Wonders, you control a merchant ship that travels around, trading spices for profit. The first thing I'm going to say for this game is that even though it's more or less just a bunch of boat shaped meeples sitting on tiles - it is quite a pretty looking game. Unfortunately I didn't get a good photo of it. On to the gameplay.
First; let me explain the different spices. There are 4 types of spices, ranked from least to most valuable they are: Yellow - red - green - brown. In your turn you can move your ship 1 or more spaces, then you can perform 1 of 3 actions after moving.
There are some other mechanics, such as 'outposts'. Each player has their own board. On their board are 20 outpost markers arranged in 4 rows of five. In order to use the market action on a tile, the player must place a outpost marker on the tile. However, there are specific rules on how out post markers are removed from a player's board and placed on a market tile. Each market tile has a spice symbol (yellow, red, green, brown) and each of the 4 rows of outposts has a corresponding symbol. Thus: If playing an outpost marker on to a market tile with a yellow symbol, it must be the left-most outpost marker from the yellow row that is placed on to the market tile. This is important, as how markers are removed from your board makes difference.
And that's good. There's more than one strategy you can pursue to earning victory points. And there always seems to be a meaningful decision to make. Sometimes you just need to recognise and adapt your tactics when circumstances change. And that's it. I enjoyed Century: Eastern Wonders enough that it goes on to the 'would like to own' list and I may revisit Century Spice Road in the future with a different mindset. Dang! Just realised; I blogged a game tabout spices and I didn't make a single reference to 'Dune'. Well The spice mu - ah too late, screw it!
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