Unsere Rezension

COnstructing Hadrian’s Wall

Praetor

Workers with pension insurance

It is the year 122 A.D. and Emperor Hadrian is delegating up to five builders, male and female, to the northern border of the British province to construct a wall to defend the Roman empire. As such a wall building project does not build itself, uses up a lot of resources and in the end needs to be defended as well, those builders are tasked with setting up the necessary infrastructure, too.

We, the players, embody those male and female builders. Round after round after round we will place our workers to acquire and use resources, hire new workers, to trade, to construct new buildings, to coin favor with the emperor and, of course, also build the wall.

So far so already seen. But Praetor possesses that little bit of something in play that makes it stand out from the grey mass of worker placement games. Workers are represented by six-sided dice. The number of pips on the dice sides indicates the experience of the workers. When a worker is sent to work this can basically happen in one of two ways. The worker can either activate a building or construct a new building.

Buildings are represented by square cardboard tiles. Those tiles, show, besides nice illustrations, building costs which have to be paid by the constructor, favor points that are gleaned by the constructor, and also an action case. As soon as a building has been constructed, it can be – once in a round – activated by any worker, possibly you might have to pay a fee to the owner of the building.

Activating the building puts to effect the action option depicted on the action case, for instance trading, acquisition of resources, hire new workers or build a section of the wall. In case of resources cases the experience of a worker determines the amount of resources that is acquired. Action cases can be red or blue. When a worker activates a building with a red action case or if he builds a building, he gains experience, his dice value is raised by one. But take care, when a worker is turned to the six side, he is pensioned off immediately. His employer gains favor with the Emperor by this, but cannot use the worker any longer, albeit only until buildings have been constructed which would allow this, after all.

After each action phase all builders must pay their workers, but also the pensioners. The number of workers that is available for each player during the game is limited. The maxim that is inherent in most worker placement games – the earlier I enlarge my work force, the better – is only valid in Praetor in a very limited way, here it is much more important to cleverly plan their use.

The game end is triggered when either all buildings have been constructed or when the Wall of Hadrian has been completed. Whoever has – after a small final scoring - gleaned  most favor with the Emperor is given the status of Praetor and wins the game.

For me, Praetor was THE discovery in Essen 2014. Designer Andrei Novac and publisher NSKN Games from Romania, came to my notice earlier with their game Warriors and Traders, but were not marked on my personal radar for a publisher that must be followed or observed without fail. This has now changed.

A tiny negative aspect, for me: Unfortunately the number of strategies that can be tried is limited. I think that more could be gotten out of the idea. Yet all in all Praetor is a felicitous and well-working game all in all that I like to put out on my gaming table.

It is also very professionally made and offers components of very good quality.

Markus Wawra

Players: 2-4

Age: 12+

Time: 90+

Designer: Andrei Novac

Artist: David Szilagyi, David J. Coffey, Agnieszka Kopera, Christian Grussi

Price: ca. 40 Euro

Publisher: Heidelberger Spieleverlag / NSKN 2014

Web: www.heidelbaer.de

Genre: Worker placement

Users: For experts

Version: de

Rules: de en fr kr ro pl jp

In-game text: no

Comments:

Aging workers with experience

Interesting version of the classic worker placement

Good components

Rules could be better structured

Compares to:

Village, Caylus

Other editions:

NSKN, Granna, Èditions Sans-Détour, Spiral Galaxy Games and others

My rating: 5

Markus Wawra:

Placing workers + experience + pension system offers a nice variation from the usual uniform worker placement mechanisms

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 3

Strategy (blue): 2

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 2

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0