OUR REVIEW

Protection Schutzbauten gegen Trolle

Belfort

Contest of Master architects

„Belfort“ is the intended name for a glorious, fortified city meant to safeguard against hordes of wild trolls. At least that’s what the kind intended when he gave the order to build this city. Unfortunately instead of one master architect the building order was given to several individuals with that profession and so now all players need to achieve the king’s intention as best as they can.

As it was, there is only one key to the city which was proffered as a reward and as you clearly cannot divide up one city key between several master architects only the master architect who will prove his worth and accrues most victory points, will win the key.

To this purpose players hire workers in the guise of Elves, Dwarves and Gnomes and, with their help, collect resources for constructing buildings, use actions provided by those buildings and they also enlist the assistance of the guilds in Belfort. In three scoring phases all in all, at the end of spring, summer and autumn, you are awarded victory points for majorities in buildings in the city and majorities in the three classes of workers, At the begin of winter, after the seventh and last round in the game, the game ends and thus also the contest for the coveted key.

Each of the seven rounds in a game of Belfort comprises at least the four phases as follows:

In the Kalender Phase / Calendar Phase the year advances and a new round of the game begins. You advance the round marker on the seasons track by one step and thus mark the actual status of the game.

The next phase is the Einsatzphase / Placement Phase, in which each player assigns tasks to his workers. This happens by placing a worker on one of the available action spaces. Those spaces include the recruiter’s desk to recruit additional elves or dwarves, the King’s Camp to change the order of play, spaces for five different guild actions and available actions on your own building cards already in your display.

If cannot place more workers or do not want to place more workers, then you must pass and do not participate any further in this phase, but you now, when you pass, place your remaining workers on up to four resources spaces. Later in the round those workers will give you resources for constructing buildings and gold for paying taxes.

When all players have passed, the game continues with the Einnahmenphase / Collection Phase. In this phase the workers that were placed in the previous phase return with new resources, workers and/or a new sequence of play. Buildings already placed previously now yield additional gold, which you can set against royal taxes that you need to pay.

Depending on the advancement on the victory point track those taxes are different for all players; if you cannot pay you must retreat one point for each lacking gold coin.

Now we have arrived at the core phase of the game, the Aktionsphase / Action Phase and we implement instantly – in order of play - all remaining actions. At this point we can use guilds in the city where we have workers and also our own buildings and can activate building actions by using gnomes. If you are in terribly need you can use Horsts Handelsposten / Crazy Ord’s Trading Post to barter resources and gold for what you need.

With a sufficient amount of collected or bartered resources you then can build those rewarding buildings. After paying the cost for building you place the corresponding building card in your display and then put a house in your color on a corresponding free square in one of the five districts in the city. Those houses earn you victory points in the scoring phases, the corresponding building cards can be used from the following round onwards.

To enable you to acquire new cards, you may as your last action in your turn buy a building card from the open display or the face-down draw pile, before, finally, one of three scoring phases can occur.

In such a scoring each district of Belfort is dealt with separately and checked for majorities in houses: The player who has most houses in a district scores five points, the one in second place three points and – with four players in the game – the one in third places scores one point. When all districts have been scored you score three points if you have most workers of a class and one point for the player in second place.

The winner is the player with most victory points and can pride himself on the key to the City of Belfort.

All in all Belfort is a rather well-done mix of worker placement and majorities mechanisms, which impresses one by the creative fantasy background story and its beautiful design implementation. The purpose of the game – collecting resources and use them to construct buildings – is all but new but all the same comes across nicely due to the different classes of workers and the many kinds of buildings and does not have such a constructed feeling like some other games in that genre. The twelve different guilds, of which only five are used for any given game, introduce enough diversification and interaction between players and provide a certain amount of replay value. I also can award Brownie points for the well-written rules and the helpful summary boards.

Albeit being interesting and inviting due to those features, the allure of the game diminishes quickly after a few games. The possible actions and schematics seem monotonous and rehearsed and the selection of buildings seems to be inconsequential after all. Too much importance is placed on collecting enough resources in each turn to be able to place one or two houses on the board to secure pre-eminence in the districts. The different guilds are only of limited help there.

The really deciding factor for the diminishing allure is on the one hand the always identical scoring of victory points in all scoring phases, which can result rather early in the game to a seemingly unreachable head start for one player. And, on the other hand, aside from the scorings, there is no alternative way for scoring points. Therefore you need direct trading or cooperation between several players in order to stop the leading player and this is simply a sure way to result in kingmaker moves.

All those who can adapt to those game mechanisms and have a preference for the well-implemented fantasy topic will definitely get their money’s worth out of this game. The action varieties of buildings and and the predominantly tactical decisions in the game offer sufficient possibilities to interest expert gamers, and yet remain simple and straightforward to allow occasional players a nice introduction into the game and a chance to win, because you do not win this game on your own.

Dennis Rappel

Players: 2-5

Age: 12+

Time: 120+

Designer: Jay Cormier, Sen-Foong Lim

Artist: Josh Cappel, Satya Hody, Hans-Georg Schneider

Price: ca. 40 Euro

Publisher: Pegasus 2012

Web: www.pegasus.de

Genre: City building, worker placement, majorities

Users: With friends

Version: de

Rules: de en pl

In-game text: yes

Comments:

Very beautiful design and implementation of the topic

Well-structured and well thought-out mechanisms

Static victory points scoring system

Strong kingmaker element

Compares to:

All city building and worker placement game

Other editions:

Tasty Minstrel Games, USA; Lacerta, Poland;

My rating: 4

Dennis Rappel:

Belfort is definitely a worker placement game in the classic sense, but the mix of already known elements and witty fantasy topic introduces something new and interesting, albeit the fun being a little diminished due to the monotonous victory point mechanism.

Chance (pink): 0

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 1

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0