REZENSION

Noria

Alien worlds, rare elements

It began with the wheel

The first creation by Sophia Wagner takes us into fantasy realms featuring flying islands and lets us trade in exotic resources; however, soon we have to realize that even in this fantastic world nothing works without lobbying, or your company will fail by the wayside. And thus, we have landed back in reality with a bump. As to game mechanics, Sophia Wagner introduces some interesting ideas, from action wheels to walking political paths. The first, action wheels, seem to be working very well, according to some trial games, the political aspect is not to everybody’s taste.

Noria is a game for two to four players. As the owner of a trading empire, players try to increase their wealth and to invest their money into projects at the Town Hall, to be involved in the future development of Noria. For this it is important to support politicians that sit in the Chambers of the Town Hall and decide on the importance of projects there. Saying this, we have summarized the aim of the game: Players develop their trading empire by acquiring transport ships for resources and by building factories producing goods, with the purpose of producing/providing resources and goods with those two elements. Then resources and goods are spent to invest in four available projects. The ranking in importance of those projects players determine together via the political element. Whoever has provided most support for the right products and the end of the game, will win.

So, it will only become clear over the course of the game, which of the four projects are the right ones, which will bring most victory points at the end, that is. Unfortunately, your fellow players often work towards different goals than yourself. As to game mechanics, a project is represented by a path. Players wander upwards along that path with their marker, your Representative, that is, always when they have invested in this individual project.

Each of the four projects demands its own special investment; for two of them simple certain resources are enough, the other two demand goods, one of them simple ones, the other one complex ones. Goods must be produced by players, by processing resources in their own factories, which of course must be built first.

So, it is more difficult to advance on the two projects demanding goods, but their advantage lies in that they enable you to accrue more victory points. However, this is only correct in theory: Because affiliated to each project is a Chamber where there are politicians who support the projects. During the game, players influence those politicians, who in the end determine, how many victory points a level on the path of this project will yield.

Let me say it beforehand - this part of the game is destructive, because when a player decides to support one chamber he must cause damage to another one at the same time: You move a politician in one chamber in that area of the chamber where the politician increases the victory points for the level and at the same time you remove one politician from another chamber, thereby reducing the maximum possible number of victory points in this chamber, as no politicians can be introduced to a chamber during the game.

This influencing of politician aside, the game is completely action-driven. Actions must be spent to acquire resources, to produce goods, to construct factories, to acquire transport ships, to support projects and even to expand your own pool of actions. This takes us to the essential and unique game element and mechanism of Noria: They pyramid with its set of actions wheels made up from three rings.

Every player has his own set of action wheels, the wheels are placed in three levels on his pyramid. Every action wheel has room for placement of action discs which represent the actions themselves, each action disc represents one action. During the game, the action wheels fill up, again due to actions, with various action discs.

Seven action discs allow every player seven unique actions as well as a bonus action.

At the start of the game, each player receives six individual action discs which he must distribute on his action wheels according to the instructions in the rules. For a player it is important, on the one hand, that he fills his action wheels with the action discs that are good for him, and, on the other hand, that he arranges them in a useful and suitable formation, because the arrangement/placement of the action wheels needs to be carefully considered:

Every action wheel provides a certain number of slots where you can place action discs. The top action wheel has only room for two action discs, the middle action wheel already offers four slots for action discs and the bottom action wheel even provides six slots for action discs. For every player, however, only one half of an action wheel is active, which means that you can only use action discs placed in the active part for an action. The active part of the action wheel changes at the end of each player turn, as at that point each action wheel is rotated by one position.

There are further restrictions for the selection of action discs which give even more importance on the suitable and profitable positioning of action discs: A player is only allowed to make use of one action disc per action wheel and you can only select those action discs in adjacent levels that - if you draw a line in your mind between those discs - do not touch any other action discs or any empty slot with this line. Due to those restrictions on selectable action discs, the well-considered arrangement of action discs is an essential aspect in the game; a subsequent arrangement of the action discs is - in a limited way - possible, but comes with a price!

Action discs are used to resolve actions in the game; two of the discs influence the action options of the player himself. One of them is the bonus action disc. If a player selects this bonus action discs in his turn, he can resolve another action disc that he selected a second time. The other action discs similar to this is the Tool action disc which can be used to flip over one of the player’s action discs to its backside. All action discs come with two different sides, one normal one and one upgraded one. When an action discs shows the upgraded side, you can resolve the action twice. Sounds rather powerful, but has one restriction - regardless of how many upgraded action discs a player selects in his turn, he can only use the double action resolving with one them.

The Tool action discs can, instead of using it to flip over a disc, also be used for another action, the production of simple and/or complex goods, that it. By discarding the necessary resources, a player may turn over his empty Warehouse tokens, which he acquires with factories he built, turn over to the filled side, either all of one type of goods or one warehouse for each type of goods.

Another action disc with a double function is the City action discs. This disc enables the player, either to acquire a new action disc from the market for placement on his action wheels, or to invest in a project. The action discs are arranged by type on the market, the assignment to the individual market slots happens randomly during the set-up phase of the game. This provides a certain variation in the individual games, as the costs for an action discs depend on its respective placement on the market; payment for discs always happens with resources. To invest in a project, a player must pay exactly the costs as demanded and may then advance the respective Representative by one step on the corresponding track.

Three varieties of action discs are reserved exclusively for production of resources / raw materials, for each of the three varieties of Obsidian, Energy and Mycelium there is an individual action disc. When you use this action, each transport ship that you own for the resource of a certain action disc provides one resource, in case of an upgraded action disc you get two resources, of course.

Now you only need one action disc to increase the number of your own transport ships and for the construction of ships - this is the Journey action disc. The transport ships in Noria in reality are space ships, because Noria is made up of several islands floating in the air/in space; the are the location of the mines, from where the resources are transported to players in their transport ships.

Those islands are randomly selected face-down and are still face-down at the start of the game. A characteristic of those islands is - among others - the number of transport ships that can be acquired by players from a given island, whereby each island only provides two varieties of resources.

How can a player acquire such a transport ship? He sends his Representative to an island, resolving the Journey action. Every player has a playing piece, his Representative, who travels from island to island, for this action all islands are always available. A new island is simply revealed by turning it up and equipping it with transport ships according. The Journey action is basically free of charge, but if you happen to end your journey on an island where other Representatives are present, this journey will cause costs to pay.

A Representative arriving on an island has two options on this island; he can either take one of the transport ships still available on the island, to increase his future productions of the respective resource, or he builds a factory on the island. For this purpose, each player has his own board with seven factory tiles. He takes the top one and places it one the island. An island, in turn, offers room for four factories - two of them produce the same good, and one of those two produces only one copy of the good, the other one two copies. So, a player puts his factory tile on the free factory space of his choice on the island and receives warehouse tiles, which he takes, depending on the selected space one or two of the good depicted there. Each warehouse tile has an empty and a full side; whenever a player produces this good using the Tool action disc, discarding the necessary resources, that is, he turns the warehouse over to the full side and has good of this variety available.

One element of the game has not been mentioned so far and is, anyhow, only really introduced to the game when factories are built: The Knowledge tiles. After every second factory that a player has built, his factory board reveals a Knowledge tile that is depicted on the board. At the end of his turn, a player receives as many Knowledge tiles as are visible on his factory board.

In Noria, Knowledge is used as currency for payment in several ways. Using Knowledge, a player can switch places for action discs on his action wheels at the start of his turn, even several times, albeit with increasing costs, or can rotate one of his action wheels by one position. Or he can, after the action phase of his turn, decide to machinate -> he pays Knowledge to politicians to change their positions in the Chambers: one politician is shifted into the scoring area in a chamber, and another one who is not yet in the scoring area, is removed from any chamber of the player’s choice. This option gets more and more expensive the later in the game you use it.

Knowledge can be acquired by a player, when, in his turn, he decides to forgo the resolving of a selected action disc, or using the trade/swap function that does not need an action disc for implementing; you can transform Knowledge into Resources or Goods into Knowledge.

Noria is played in a given number of rounds; in each round, every player has one turn and can start the turn by spending Knowledge to change his action wheels; then he resolves his maximum three action discs, can then - facultatively - decide to manipulate and completes his turn with the receiving of new Knowledge tiles in relation to his factory board.

At the end of the game, the four paths for the projects are scored. Every player multiplies the position of his Representative on the path with the respective victory point value of the level, determined by the politicians in the corresponding chamber. Then, two more chambers are scored, which are not connected to a project. With those chambers, you score again that Representative of a player who did advance furthest on a path, and that Representative who has made the least progress on a path. For this scoring, however, a player needs to have placed all four of his representatives onto paths. At the end of this scoring, the winner is known.

Noria convinces by the mechanisms of the action wheels. Those wheels demand good planning ahead; a player needs to consider which actions he want to have, how often he needs them and in which combination he needs them. According to those demands, he must equip his action wheels. This is a thrilling challenge and a game mechanic that I have not encountered yet, not even in a similar guise, but which I like very much. That mechanic is also the point where the game allows mistakes, because should you something have gone wrong, you always can, by using the - albeit rather scarce - knowledge tiles, change the configuration of your action wheels.

The amount of liberty granted to a player in choosing his action discs and their arrangement on the wheels is rather high, but there is a certain selection of actions that you need again and again, therefore you probably will, after a few games, arrange your action wheels always in a rather similar way for each future game.

Another mechanic I like is the Market, because due to the varying costs and the random lay-out of the action discs a game can be very different from another one, depending on which types of action discs are cheap and which are expensive in the current game.

A few rules, however, give you options which seem to me to be either too expensive or too inefficient, so that they probably will never be used in a game; one example of this is the exchange of three (!) Knowledge tiles for one single resource. At that point, the rules could be modified.

A part of the game, that in my opinion, has not turned out as well as the rest of the game, is the influencing of politicians, which not only results in a player supporting his preferred projects, but in destructively damaging another project. And this can result in the destruction of painstakingly achieved progress on paths by actions of other players. I believe that here, instead of the destructive game mechanics, a bonus system on the paths - for instance, like that in Terra Mystica, would have been by far more interesting.

Bernhard Czermak

Players: 2-4

Age: 12+

Time: 120+

Designer: Sophia Wagner

Art: Michael Menzel, Holger Zimmermann, atelier198

Price: ca. 50 Euro

Publisher: Edition Spielwiese / Pegasus Spiele 2017

Web: www.pegasus.de

Genre: Development, economy

Version: multi

Rules: de en + cn en es fr it jp nl pt ru

In-game text: no

Comments:

Economic game for VP from goods;

development due to developing your action options

Political influence rather destructive

Action Wheels innovative and new

(c) Image JoergBoerg

Compares to:

First game of this kind

Other editions:

Blam! (fr), Cranio Creations (it), Game Harbour (cn), Hobby Japan (jp), Hobby World (ru), Ludofy Creative (pt), SD Games (es), Stronghold (en), White Goblin (nl),

My rating: 5

Bernhard Czermak:

The allure of Noria is in the handling of the action wheels, to assemble them in a way that you always have suitable actions available in your turn. This not only requires selection, but also arrangement of actions. The destructive component, however, does not suit a development game.

Chance (pink): 0

Tactic (turquoise): 1

Strategy (blue): 3

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0