Building the West Kingdom
In Architects of the West Kingdom you play the part of royal architects out to impress the king with the magnificence of the buildings you can create. Watch out for your rivals though as not all are virtuous, and as the competition becomes more fierce they may stoop to all manner of infamy to defeat you.
The TL;DR
Unique worker placement options
Great quality components and clear iconography
Build to win, grab extra points where you can
Worker placement with new options
In Architects you have a lot of typical worker placement options; collect resources, earn money, improve actions and build. It also has a few unique ones and some great adaptations to the genre.
You start the game with 20 workers, and that's it. The game doesn't play in rounds with a reset cycle, or ask you to race to the resources you need to create an additional 5th or 6th worker, it floods you with all the workers you could ever need, or so you'll think. The economy of workers in Architects doesn't disappear however, it's ramped up to 11, and this is what makes it such a great game.
Each turn you will place one worker at a location, then for each worker there you gain a benefit or are able to take an action. So time to corner the silver market right? Wrong!
The Town Centre space prevents anything so foolish and contains the action option that sets this game apart. When you visit here you may pay a small tax to capture all the workers of a player at a single location . This reduces the value of future visits by that player, but as the game progresses it will also start to limit what they can do. Of course you could go there again trying to capture more of the other player's workers, but now your workers start to look like a tempting target...
Players can use the guardhouse to release their workers from your tender care. Alternately they could wait for you to collect the reward, making them a lot cheaper to recover, but risk getting caught out when the Black Market resets.
The game also has a virtue track, but unlike other games this isn't used simply as an end game reward system. It limits the actions you can take during the game as well. Too villainous? You can't work on the Cathedral, too Virtuous? No one will sell you anything at the Black Market.
Beautifully clear
Architects is a truly gorgeous game, with lavish artwork in a style I enjoy. Its also cohesive and everything seems to work together from the characters to the board to the workers and buildings.
The character cards are all two sided so that you can play as male or female and while that's good, its a shame that they're all white European. If we can get far enough away from the 17th century to allow women to become architects, surely we can allow non-Caucasians this too?
The board is well constructed and the meeples and tokens are made of wood to a high quality. While the cards aren't the best, they're robust enough given that you rarely shuffle them. The cardboard tokens are sufficient to the task, though I'm not a fan of cardboard coins as they tend to age badly.
The iconography is incredibly clear and a few minutes looking at the board would be enough to figure most of it out without reference to the rulebook. With the 3d meeples (which are the only 3d icons) it isn't immediately obvious that's what they are and several players only recognised that when it was pointed out.
Build to win
Appropriately in a game called Architects the main course of the scoring is around what you built, with everything else providing a garnish.
The scoring equations at the bottom of each character sheet make it look as though the game is going to be a points salad. While there are several ways to score points and almost everything you have will score at the end of the game (if you have enough of them) you really need to build to stand a chance of wining.
