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Guilds of London
Jun. 3rd, 2024 03:08 pmYesterday, we spent a very pleasant afternoon in the pub with some friends, playing Guilds of London.
We were a bit stymied at the start because the rulebook wasn't especially well written or particularly clear... But once we got going, we got the hang of it pretty quickly and came to a consensus easily about any areas we were uncertain of.
In the game, you recruit liverymen to your guild, then move them about the board to claim ownership of certain tiles (organisations), which allows you to collect points and bonuses for gameplay.
The action cards are used as tokens for recruitment, destinations for movement (determined by colour), special actions, and money to pay to activate the special actions. This makes things quite efficient, though it's always a bit confusing to start with when cards have multiple uses in games, I find.
Once I figured out the majority of the rules, I found it really interesting to look at my game situation and the cards in my hand and work out how to use them most effectively to achieve my goals.
Tiles were activated once a certain number of meeples were placed there, and the person with the most meeples present gained ownership of the tile, with a prize of some sort for whoever was second. So, it was mostly a case of figuring out where to place your meeples to best effect so as to win a tile without people being able to gazump or scupper you. There was an interesting mechanic whereby you could obtain 'neutral' meeples that you could swap out with those of other players to change the numbers at the end of the round, which made for some interesting stratagems.
Turn order was determined in reverse points order, which meant the game thought it was better to go first in the round - but we all thought it was better to go last because then you knew the whole situation and could expend only the relevant amount of resources to achieve what you wanted.
The end score were reasonably close and I came second.
Overall, I enjoyed the game once it got going and would certainly be happy to play again.
We were a bit stymied at the start because the rulebook wasn't especially well written or particularly clear... But once we got going, we got the hang of it pretty quickly and came to a consensus easily about any areas we were uncertain of.
In the game, you recruit liverymen to your guild, then move them about the board to claim ownership of certain tiles (organisations), which allows you to collect points and bonuses for gameplay.
The action cards are used as tokens for recruitment, destinations for movement (determined by colour), special actions, and money to pay to activate the special actions. This makes things quite efficient, though it's always a bit confusing to start with when cards have multiple uses in games, I find.
Once I figured out the majority of the rules, I found it really interesting to look at my game situation and the cards in my hand and work out how to use them most effectively to achieve my goals.
Tiles were activated once a certain number of meeples were placed there, and the person with the most meeples present gained ownership of the tile, with a prize of some sort for whoever was second. So, it was mostly a case of figuring out where to place your meeples to best effect so as to win a tile without people being able to gazump or scupper you. There was an interesting mechanic whereby you could obtain 'neutral' meeples that you could swap out with those of other players to change the numbers at the end of the round, which made for some interesting stratagems.
Turn order was determined in reverse points order, which meant the game thought it was better to go first in the round - but we all thought it was better to go last because then you knew the whole situation and could expend only the relevant amount of resources to achieve what you wanted.
The end score were reasonably close and I came second.
Overall, I enjoyed the game once it got going and would certainly be happy to play again.
