Carpe Diem

review

Seize the day

Carpe Diem

What for?

Carpe Diem – a dictum by the Roman poet Horaz, which he used in the year 23 B.C. in the first book of his poem collection Carmina, in the ode “To Leukonoe” and a dictum that still is meaningful more than 2000 years later as there are, after all, only two days in a year when you can do nothing, and those are “yesterday” and “tomorrow”. So Carpe Diem is an absolutely gripping title with the small fault that is has next to nothing to do with the game. It does, however, fit the designer Stefan Feld rather well. With the last 15 years, he has, in addition to his main work as a teacher and head of school, published nearly 30 games, and very successfully, too. This is proven by the ten nominations and recommendations for Game of the Year, not to forget his success in Deutscher Spielepreis, where he was ranked ten times among the first ten places and had a very near miss for first place three times, 2007 with „Notre Dame“, 2011 with „Die Burgen von Burgund“ and 2012 with „Trajan“, bested by „Die Säulen der Erde“, „7 Wonders“ und „Village“. I myself have twenty of his games in my private collection and may declare myself as a “Stefan Feld Freak“ and am sure that I am not alone with this preference.

The game contents: The cover shows a fish and vegetable vendor in ancient Rome. A customer with script rolls in hand and a half-finished building are meant to indicate actions in the game. As patricians and constructors, we will, during four phases comprising seven rounds each, set up our own city districts as rich in points as possible, laying it out using tiles, that is. For this purpose, each of the maximum four players receives a building board featuring a grid of 36 squares, and one of four different frames for this board. Nine cases carry markings for banderole tiles. When those markings are covered during the game, you score points on the banderole bar. 123 building tiles represent the main element of the game, albeit in two nearly indistinguishable shades of green, especially with inadequate illumination, and present a real problem. Furthermore, we find 18 tiles in the box that represent bread loaves but are more reminiscent of tree slabs; I will get back to what they do later. Components are completed by 150 cards, 66 of them are used for victory points, representing values from 1 to 25. 24 fountain cards provide different amounts of bonus points for the game end scoring. The remaining sixty cards are used in the scorings of the four phases; you use, however, only maximum twelve out of those sixty cards in a game, which of course provides incredible variety. There are also 24 card board coins for gold, which work as jokers. Wooden components comprise four pawns – patricians - and five discs in each player color as well as 20 commodities – grapes, herbs, chicken and fish. Four summary boards facilitate bonus allocations during the rounds as well as the scoring of points at the end of the game.

Game set-up: The main game board features a heptagon in the middle of the board, surrounded by seven squares, each of them divided into four cases. Each of those seven squares is connected by two lines to two opposite squares. During the game, each turn – notwithstanding exceptions – is only possible within those two options. Then you put four of the light green building tiles randomly on each of the seven squares. Those squares show, on one hand, half of cultivation terrains like garden, pond, chicken coop and vineyard, and on the other hand, half of buildings for merchants, baker, administrator, craftsman and villa parts. In addition, there are individual tiles for markets, bakeries and fountains.

Then there is a track with 20 slots for the banderole scoring, which is responsible for assigning the sequence of scoring. Then there are eleven slots for dark green tiles with practically identical configuration. Another case is provided for twelve scoring slots – another main feature of the game. Here, the scoring cards are also allocated randomly, depending on the number of players, twelve for four players, ten for three and eight for two players. At the start of the game, the starting player is allocated eight victory points, the other players in turn receive one point more than the previous player.

How do I score additional points? Well, in your turns, you try to complete those tiles with halves of terrains or buildings on your board. Those completions earn you various bonuses. A completed Administrator building, for instance, allows you advancing two steps on the banderole bar. The baker gives you two bread loaves. Those loaves are useful insofar as you can discard one to ignore the connecting lines on the main board for your movement. Discarding three breads represents fulfillment of a scoring condition. The completed merchant building enables bartering of wares for coins and receiving one additional gold. Which is useful, as gold is a joker for scoring. The craftsman building gives you access to the eleven dark green tiles outside the heptagon and thus an additional tile placement in your turn. If you complete the chicken coop the reward is – not unexpectedly – a chicken. In the garden you receive a leaf, in the vineyard a grape and at the pond a fish. Three of the tiles are already complete – the bakery which donates one loaf, the market gives you a coin and if you place a fountain you can choose one of two fountain cards. Those cards offer various bonuses for the end-of-game scoring. Villas give no advantages during the game, but their chimneys count at the end of the game, providing 26 points in case of up to eleven chimneys, an amount not to be neglected.

When positioning houses and landscape you should also take into consideration the scoring award promised by the requirements printed on your board frame. Various options are available; to score, the respective tiles must be placed on the indicated line.

As soon as all 28 building tiles have been used, the first scoring happens. The twelve scoring tiles differ in two criteria. You must either own the requirements indicated on the tiles to receive the bonuses – completed houses, landscapes and maybe chimneys – or you must discard given commodities. The snag in this is, that you must decide definitely on two cards horizontally or vertically adjacent. If you cannot meet the requirements of one of them, you score four penalty points instead of a bonus. Whoever is in first position on the banderole bar goes first to place one of his three scoring discs. After the scoring, the squares around the hexagon are filled again, beginning with the light green tiles. After three phases, the dark green tiles are used.

At the end of the game, a lot of additional victory points are to be had, for instance and already mentioned, the chimneys of completed villas. Eventual remaining commodities, bread loaves, coins and tiles that could not be placed correctly as well as various commodities, divided by two. At this point, you also use fountain cards that you acquired. A clever placement of objects in relation to the requirements provided by the frames also yields a huge amount of points.

As the victory points acquired during the game are noted on the cards and are not open information, there can be some surprises about the final winner of the game.

My conclusion: The game has the quality that we are used to in games by Stefan Feld and my expectations have not been disappointed. The randomly displayed building tiles and the restricted turn options demand long-range planning. The variable frames that give preference on individual buildings or terrains, offer additional variety. All in all, mechanisms that provide a high replay allure.

Unfortunately, the graphic design has been completely botched. I do not know what kind of devil possessed alea to give the task to a newcomer who obviously has no idea or familiarity with boardgames whatsoever. Aside from the weak color difference on the backside of the building tiles, the color difference between baker and merchant could be clearer. Market and bakery are barely recognizable as such. The terrain tiles, too, could have been done better, take for instance those microscopely small chicken dots on the coop. This goes with the small summary board and is typical for the faulty design. Again, I cannot understand, too, why the banderole tiles must be so minuscule, which just goes with the fact that the terrains on the frames are drawn squarely while elsewhere they are presented as ellipses. This tells of sloppy work or at least inattentive work.

Stefan Feld has definitely not deserved such treatment of an excellent game at the hands of a beginner, as there are, after all, excellent designers in the industry, like Klemens Franz, Franz Vohwinkel or Michael Menzel, to name only a few of them. My recommendation would be to hand over the second edition to a proven illustrator and to destroy the rest. I would buy a re-designed game instantly and throw out my original copy.

Rudolf Ammer

Players: 2-4

Age: 10+

Time: 75+

Designer: Stefan Feld

Artist: Lalanda Hruschka

Price: ca. 37 Euro

Publisher: alea / Ravensburger 2018

Web: www.ravensburger.de

Genre: Tile placement

Users: For families

Version: multi

Rules: de en fr + es

In-game text: no

Comments:

Excellent game

Very high replay value

Bad graphics

Compares to:

Tile placement games for area control

Other editions:

Maldito (es)

My rating: 5

Rudolf Ammer:

A game of optimization which offers high replay value due to its manifold variations but suffers from inadequate graphics.

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 1

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 2

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0