OUR REVIEW

Pull your pack from your bag

Orléans

A virtually perfect bag building game

Cited from the publisher’s text:

“Playable for 2-4 players, ages 12 - with the thematic goal of acquiring dominance in medieval France by trade, construction activities and science. In the focus of events we find the City of Orléans and the neighboring region of the Loire where you can travel for trade to other towns to acquire coveted commodities and set up trade posts!”

Boring!

All those that are at this point on the brink of falling asleep or turning over the page I kindly entreat to wake again and to read on because, setting aside the topic - with the one thousandst local adaption of the current topic for board games per se you cannot stand out from the crowd and only get, maybe, some Frenchmen or Francophile fans of the Loire Valley to show interest - I have nothing at all to critizise  in the game. On the contrary, I believe it to be one of the most interesting games of the 2014 crop, to begin with my final conclusion.

The heart of a good game is the mechanism of the game and that is exactly what makes Orléans interesting. The game goes over 18 rounds. In turns with changing starting players each player has actions in order to expand his own … what is it? A trade empire? On order to implement actions those actions must be activated first. To achieve this you must place a number of minions on the corresponding action case of your own player board, minions that vary in type and number from one individual action to the other. Those minions have different professions - there are farmers, craftsmen, traders, skippers, knights, scholars and monks. All of them are represented by different cardboard tiles.

At the start of the round most tiles are storen in individual cloth bags assigned to each of the players. A certain number of those tiles is drawn randomly from the bag and may be assigned to the action cases. When the respective actions have been implemented, you throw the action-activating minions bag into the bag. What kind of minion you draw is of course for the most part due to chance, but not to chance alone. Why? Because which minions you might draw can be determined by a rather huge degree by players themselves, as minions are acquired by certain actions and as there are also options to get rid of minions again.

Another fact is, that minions that were placed on action cases stay there until you have implemented the action. It could therefore be useful to not implement an action that you could implement if you believe to gain an advantage in the drawing for the next round. To be able to activate important actions and thus pursue a certain strategy it is of essential importance to keep control of the contents of your bag.

This mechanism is not necessarily new - let me mention here, for instance, the game Siberia, also published by dlp games and released in 2011, or the game Hyperboria, that has been published in 2014, too - but has been virtually perfectly implemented in Orlléans and is - as yet - contrary to the meanwhile omnipresent and very similar deck building games still rather fresh and unspent. In the meantime, however, I have already come across some denominations for that kind of game, all in English, for instance bag building (deutsch: Beutel bauen) or pool building.

The different actions that can be activated, mostly allow you to hire new minions and/or to accrue, in one way or another, victory points for the final scoring. Those elements are for a very big part already familiar from other games, therefore I will not enter into them in detail in this review. I only mention the raising of the Knight Track value, where the advance not only entails hiring of minions of the Knight profession, but also determines how many minions you may draw from the bag in each round, and also the craftsmen which are linked to the acquisition of technology tiles. Those technology tiles are, when acquired, placed onto the minion case of an action case and from now on replace such a minion for the remainder of the game. They also stay in place when the action has been implemented and cannot be relocated. Should a player manage to achieve a good head-start in those two categories this results in a higher number of implementable actions for him - a definite and crucial advantage that must be frustrated by the other players. I for myself have as yet not found a definite strategy that could counter-balance this advantage. As all tiles are limited in Orléans, including the number of minions as well as technology tiles, money and commodities, there is no way that would enable you to make good this head-start.

Also of interest are the location cards. Those cards are acquired together with traders and enable their owner to implement a special action that usually is somewhat stronger or cheaper than the standard actions and also enable a player to pursue various strategies.

At the end of each round an event is put into effect, which usually forces players to hand in something. This introduces a small element of chance, but is usually only of minor importance.

The components of the game are very good, with a really eye-catching number of different cardboard tiles. The drawings by Klemens Franz remind me of medieval paintings, but are modern, colorful and very clear which contributes a lot to the positive overall impression.

With a price of nearly 50 Euros Orléans surely ranks at the top end of the price scale, if you include paramaters like components and volume of the game, but it is also a very felicitous game all in all that will definitely appear on my games table quite a few times.

A final remark: On the website of the publisher there are a few extensions to the rules in the FAQ section, which were not worded clear enough in the first edition, and some suggestions how you can defuse the - at least at first glance - very powerful Bath House. New rules are provided including all those changes.

Markus Wawra

Players: 2-4

Age: 12+

Time: 90+

Designer: Reiner Stockhausen

Artist: Klemens Franz

Price: ca. 50 Euro

Publisher: dlp games 2014

Web: www.dlp-games.de

Genre: Bag building game

Users: For experts

Version: multi

Rules: de en

In-game text: no

Comments:

Interesting Mechanism

Good components

Boring topic

Compares to:

Siberia, Hyperborea

Other editions:

Tasty Minstrel Games

My rating: 6

Markus Wawra:

An as yet rather fresh mechanism, packed into a nearly perfectly implemented board game. The topic comes across as somewhat forced and could not be more boring, but yet Orléans for me is one of the most interesting new releases of 2014.

Chance (pink): 2

Tactic (turquoise): 3

Strategy (blue): 2

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 1

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0