Review
Bear from the Heavens
Heaven & Ale
Barley in the light, money in the shadows
Players are heads of monasteries. And what do you do in a monastery? Well, brewing beer, of course! If you brewed the best beer after three rounds with two players, four rounds with three players and six rounds with four players, you win the game.
Every player receives a player board, which shows an empty monastery garden, surrounded by a scoring track. The monastery garden is divided into a sun side and a shadow side. On the scoring track, you place scoring markers for five resources – barley, water, hops, yeast and wood – and a pawn for the master brewer.
At the start of each round, the cases of the action rack are filled with randomly placed tiles. Then, beginning with the starting player, each player in turn resolves one action. To do this, you move your action marker forward any number of cases on a case where you can do an action. This is repeated until all action markers have arrived at the end of the action track. The deciding factor here is that you can only move forward, never backwards. As you can, however, move forward any number of cases, it is a tactical decision if you advance quickly to the good-value cases further ahead, or go more slowly and collect on the medium-value cases to be able to collect more. What is the better decision, depends on your fellow players, because they face the same decisions, as all players have the same option in principle.
Most cases on the track enable you to acquire resources or monk tiles. Such tiles are placed into your monastery garden. If you want to place a tile into the shadow area, you pay the price in Ducats. If, however, you want to place the tile into the sunny area, you must pay double the price in Ducats. Resources tiles are available in all five resources colors, ranging from values 1 to 5. Monks are available in four colors, which are basically equally good and useful, but have different prices from 1 to 4.
Where you place tiles on the board, is a very interesting, multidimensional decision. To list all details those decisions are based on, would exceed the scope of this review.
Other cases on that action track enable you to trigger scorings. There are different kinds of scorings. You can score all resources cases of a certain number value. You can score all resources cases of a color. You can score all monks of a color. However, in principle, you can only do each type of scoring once during the game.
Resources tile that you score give you their value in Ducats, when the tile is situated in the shadow or as points on the scoring track of the respective resource, when the tile is in the sun.
Monks that are scored activate all tiles that surround them. Resource tiles activated by scoring monks are scored as mentioned above. For each activated monk you may advance the master brewer one case on the scoring track.
The last type of action is the meeting of barrel goals. There are various categories for those barrel goals; you must, for instance, have placed six tiles of value 1, or have scored all resources. The first two players to meet such a barrel goal will score points for them at the end of the game.
Beer is scored at the end of the game: For this scoring, each player calculates the barrel value of his worst resource, that is, the value that is indicated by the resources marker in last position on the scoring track. This worth is multiplied by a factor that depends on the progress of the master brewer on the scoring track. However, before that calculation you may upgrade the worst resources markers by spending ten Ducats each, and well-valued resources may be swapped for bad ones in a ratio of X:1. X is again determined by the progress of the master brewer and has a value between 1 and 5.
Heaven & Ale is a highly interesting game as regards to tactics. The mechanism of tile taking is very interactive. Before each move, I must carefully consider what will my best move. Will I will move immediately forward to the tile that is most important for me to make sure that I will get it, or do I risk and intermediary step to collect another good case in passing and hope that nobody else will take away my tile? If you made the right decision will often only be known after all players have done their turn.
Triggering of scorings is another complex decision. On principle, I want to score late, because by then I might have more tiles in the category about to be scored. However, money is usually tight, so sometimes I must trigger scorings to accrue some money. Furthermore, scorings are also triggered by discs on the action cases. When those discs are gone, the respective scorings can no longer be triggered. Therefore, it is not possible for all players to do all scorings.
All in all, a game is a sum of very many complex decisions that do leave little room for mistakes. Due to the multiplying factors there can be vast differences in points scored. Therefore, experienced, frequent players are the target group for Heaven & Ale.
What is missing a little bit is a little something that would enhance the replayability allure of the game. Individual games only differ in the random allocation of the tiles and the high interaction level due to the mechanisms. Other games of similar complexity offer more strategic variations that beg to be explored. After a game, I never have wanted to play it again immediately.
The game is professionally designed and in all craft aspects it is state of the art; the rules are very well written and very clear. I, personally, do not like the style of the graphic design, for me it is too bleak and a bit too simplified, I miss the little details that create an eye-catcher.
Markus Wawra
Players: 2-4
Age: 12+
Time: 90+
Designer: Michael Kiesling, Andreas Schmidt
Artist: Fiore GmbH
Price: ca. 40 Euro
Publisher: eggertspiele / Plan B 2017
Web: www.pegasus.de
Genre: Positioning game
Users: For experts
Version: de
Rules: de en fr hu
In-game text: no
Comments:
Complex decisions
Very interactive
Very good rules
Bleak design
Compares to:
Glen More, Francis Drake
Other editions:
Eggertspiele (en fr), Piatnik (hu)
My rating: 5
Markus Wawra:
I like being permanently challenged in playing Heaven & Ale. Every move represents a complex and important decision, albeit with a mechanism not really new, that however, differs nicely from the uniform standard worker placement and deck building mix.
Chance (pink): 1
Tactic (turquoise): 2
Strategy (blue): 1
Creativity (dark blue): 0
Knowledge (yellow): 0
Memory (orange): 0
Communication (red): 0
Interaction (brown): 3
Dexterity (green): 0
Action (dark green): 0