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Whaleyland
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« on: June 12, 2010, 02:49:58 pm » |
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Greetings again. Today I want to discuss Hans im Glück's eighth foray into full expansion land: Bridges, Castles & Bazaars. In all actuality, this full expansion is really three little expansions all thrown into one box. It reminds me quite a bit of [thing=33458]Count, King & Consort[/thing] except none of these little expansions have been released before. As per usual, my review focuses on a two-player game and how that helps or hinders the new expansion.
The first title mini expansion is Bridges. Brides rather surprised me. In a two-player game, each player begins with three bridges. Bridges allow a player to basically skip over up to three tiles in a row by "bridging" over them. The bridges tiles must have fields on the sides where the bridge sits and a road may touch one or both sides of the bridge (the bridge can be free-standing but that rather defeats the purpose). When I first saw this feature, I thought it looked hideous. I admit it does not look quite as bad when actually used. I also thought it's coolest aspect would be to help fill in holes in the board...but it rarely accomplishes that goal since now players just try to make holes that have a road perpendicular to another road, negating the ability to place a bridge. The best feature of the Bridge is, in fact, to connect fields. Yeah, it surprised me too when my girlfriend connected our fields on the second-to-last turn stealing the game from me. Where normally a road would have to go, potentially blocking two fields, now a simple tile with a field on either side (like a field cloister) can be placed with the bridge going OVER the fields, allowing them to link. It makes the bridge extremely powerful in field politics and makes it much harder to win the field race in two-player games.
The next mini expansion is Castles. The new Castle tokens can be placed astride 4-point (2 segment) cities and changes how that city is scored. Instead of receiving the usual 4-points, the player waits for an adjacent feature to be scored and scores those points instead. If nothing adjacent is scored by the end of the game, the castle scores nothing (we found this rarely happens). This mechanic really has two potential uses in a two-player game. Either you can negate your opponent's points, which is sometimes a good strategy if it is something like a large city being built. Or you can double your own points. Your castle scores for the first completed adjacent feature, so if you have your own huge city being built, try to double it by getting a castle adjacent to your city and having the city completed soon after (before some other adjacent item is scored). The best tactic for the castle is to avoid placing a castle beside or adjacent to a road since roads rarely score many points (although they can).
The final mini expansion is Bazaars. This is my least favorite element of this expansion, ESPECIALLY for two-players as it is not designed with them in mind. The rules for this section are badly translated as well. The premise is that when you draw a tile that looks suspiciously like the Catapult tiles (and just as ugly), you hold an auction to sell some tiles (equal to the number of players) with the cost coming out of your points. Basically, in a two-player game the auction is only one round. The opponent draws the two tiles and places a bid on one of the tiles, and then the current player makes a counter bid. If the opponent will match that bid, they give the current player the points. If they don't match it, the current player gives the opponent the points and gets the tile. If the current player doesn't bid, the opponent pays their bid points but doesn't give the points to their opponent. The player who didn't get a tile the first time gets the other tile for free. Neither player has to bid on a tile. And so presents the inherent problem of this mini expansion: rarely does a player need the tile bad enough to bid any points. I've played this expansion twice and I usually bid just to do it, not because I really need the tile. When I do need the tile, my girlfriend knows and makes me pay for it, sometimes enough to make it not worth the price. This mechanic may work well in a game of four players, but it is not well designed for a two-player game and I rather suspect it will see little use in my regular play even while the other mini expansions will.
The last non-expansion are four new tile configurations that do not include Bazaar icons on them. They are pretty generic and seem to be designed specifically for the [thing=31784]Abbey & Mayor[/thing] expansion since one tile depicts a road that goes around (rather than through) a cloister, which is great for depriving the wagon piece a place to move to. Another new tile is a witch's hat city with a road going toward a rather unusual corner of the hat. Overall, a nice small addition of some new tiles.
My final conclusion is that this expansion is much better than [thing=38855]Catapult[/thing] and [thing=45748]Wheel of Fortune[/thing] but seems like it is stretching for some past glory that it can't achieve. It is not awful, but it is not great either. Hans im Glück claims to have many more expansion ideas in the works, but their choices lately have me questioning that. Buy this expansion if you like older expansions, but don't expect another [thing=5405]Traders & Builders[/thing].
Playability: C+
Appearance: B
Cost: B
Learning Curve: B- (mostly for Bazaar rules and translation errors)
FINAL SCORE: B-
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