Renegade Game Studios Renegade Game Studio | Architects of the West Kingdom | Board Game | Ages 12+ | 1 to 5 Players | 60 to 80 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

Essentially what I’m saying is that there is a moral case to be made that any time someone plays Architect for the first time your win should have an asterisk beside it. There is a victory point score associated with your position on the track at the end of the game… but there are also in-game benefits/penalties for your current position.

I get that it’s not for everyone, but if I’m playing a game on my own, I want there to be a challenge. Pushing your luck to grab three or four of a particular resource isn’t unheard of, and if nobody feels the need to capture your workers you can often press the advantage enough to not need that spot for the rest of the game. The tax stall, which gets populated with a portion of all the money spent in the game, works like the way everyone misremembers free parking working in Monopoly. What do people think of this solo and do the expansions add to the game for solo play, are they necessary for it to be fun at all?It’s incredibly expensive to release workers from an enemy player board until they have dropped them off in prison, and they don’t have to do that to a schedule that works for you. Contributing to the construction of a giant medieval cathedral will provide all kinds of big bonuses at great expense, but you can also score lots of points from constructing smaller buildings like trading posts, hoarding valuable resources like gold and marble and becoming virtuous through good deeds. Turns just fly around the table once everyone knows how to play, which helps keep downtime to the barest of minimums. The solo version of the game is well worth playing if you have a hankering to play but you don’t have the players. If there are only two players, they tend to mostly ignore each other or hound each other so closely that nobody can accomplish much.

I bought Explorers ages ago and thought it was just ok, so I passed on trying Raiders, but encouraged by good press bought it and the first expansion. These represent shady dealings that offer you resources for a loss in Virtue, the third concept of the game. The winner is the player who acquires the most victory points from a combination of buildings, Cathedral progress, their position on the Virtue track, any unpaid debts, and any game-end VP conditions among their buildings. It might feel awesome to say ‘I go to the quarry and get six stone’, but that’s something people are going to notice. If you have multiple workers and pay multiple coins, you can choose multiple groups, but they must all be from the same single board location.

I have always liked the Worker Placement genre, and this game looked like it would hit a lot of my buttons. A few underhanded deals here and there might not seem like much, but fall too far and you will be punished. There are so few euro games at all, let alone worker-placement games, that play up to six, so it’s a fantastic option if you have a bigger group. Garphill Games know how to make an automa opponent, and Architects of the West Kingdom is no exception.

Others might appeal because they provide you with an ongoing bonus every time you visit a stated location. If you just let them go, you might find they’re gathering an absurd amount of resources and very quickly outbuilding you.It’s a fresh take on worker placement, building further on Raiders’ already stellar offering, and is able to boast the same elegance in design as its predecessor but with a snappier speed.