“Will you be a virtuous or nefarious servant of the king? Build your way to glory.”
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/236457/architects-of-the-west-kingdom
Playing Time: 60-80 mins
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Worker Placement
Designer: S J Macdonald, Shem Phillips
Players: 1-5
As royal architects of the realm, players have a charter to help build and improve their city. Some players will choose the path of virtue and focus their efforts on building the cathedral. Others will choose a more shadowy path, taking advantage of lucrative black market goods to build less showy but more powerful landmarks. And, of course, you’re all competing to earn the favor of the king.
The central mechanic is a worker placement game unlike no other. Each player has around 20 workers, and work spaces are (generally) not exclusive – you can go where people have gone before. Even more so, a space is more powerful the more of your own workers are there – place your third worker on the lumber mill, for example, and gain 3 wood. But be careful – if too many workers gather in one spot, your opponents can have them rounded up and taken to prison, and it’ll take a jailbreak to get them out.
Architects is the best of the “West Kingdom” trilogy – although truth be told there are no losers in this line of games – and in fact probably my favorite game from this studioi. And a huge reason why is that it does a great job of having some complicated ideas while still being relatively clean and easy to teach and smooth to play.
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