Seven Wonders

I played the board game "Seven Wonders" last week with Danny, Eugene, Laura, Samy, Rob and the "team seat" of Ora and Mary-Ellen.  Most of us were learning the game for the first time, but it's not terribly complicated.  Eugene is a great teacher, and he was willing to step us through the rules without belabouring the details before they're needed.

If I had to fall back on the old "X+Y" paradigm for elevator pitches, I'd say that the game felt like playing Race for the Galaxy but using the mechanics of Guillotine.  I love both of those games, so this isn't a bad place to be, though it doesn't quite capture the pure experience of either one completely.

Like Race for the Galaxy (one of my favourite games ever, just on the strength of its theme of "building an empire" and the extreme variation from game to game, which forces players to make a plan but improvise frequently -- strategy plus disruption!) it gives each player a distinct "starting point" -- in Race for the Galaxy it's a home world, which lessens in importance as you go, but in Seven Wonders it's the "ancient wonder" (Colossus of Rhodes, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, etc.) at the heart of a bronze-age city-state -- and lets you expand your empire using a variety of additions, represented by cards, each of which gives you the capacity to more easily acquire other additions in subsequent turns.  At the end of the game, based on how much of your "wonder" you've built, and how many additions you've accrued, you score points.

But like Guillotine, every player has access to the same batch of cards, and this access rotates around the table, giving each player a crack at the cards in turn.  There are three sets of cards that make their way around the table, and once these sets are exhausted, the game ends.  But thematically, Guillotine is one of the most accessible, whimsical games I've ever seen.  You play a bunch of executioners during La Terreur, trying to collect the most prestigious collection of heads.  The nobles to be executed are lined up, the Guillotine blade makes its way around, giving players the next noble in line -- unless they monkey with things by playing the "action" cards in their hand (tripping nobles, making Marie Antoinette talk about cake and sending her to the front of the line, etc.).

Guillotine is so simple and easy to grasp, conceptually, that it's incredibly fun.  Race for the Galaxy, on the other hand, doesn't make sense for the first two games while players try to figure out what on earth all the icons on the cards mean, how they interact and so fort.  It's this complexity (because of the similar "empire-building" themes) that Seven Wonders shares that makes it less simple than Guillotine, and consequently not as much of a "game for everyone".  And unlike Race for the Galaxy, which lets you develop wildly divergent types of empire, your Seven Wonders empires are fairly limited to libraries, quarries, marketplaces and stuff.

So it's somewhere in the middle, and not quite perfect for either geeky conquerors or unconvinced non-gamers, but it's still fast and fairly simple to play.  I'd give it another try to see whether it will hold my interest like Race for the Galaxy, and I'd love to try it with people who don't play too many games.  But it's not going to appeal to as many people as Guillotine, I don't think -- it's just a bit too dry -- and I don't think it's going to show itself to have as much depth as Race for the Galaxy.

But those are pretty tough acts to follow.