If you can look beyond how abstract things feel in this medium-light offering, there is a particularly good game to be enjoyed – especially for fans of rondels, dual use cards and strategic goal chasing.
Celtae
Designer: Orlando Sá
Publisher: Pythagoras
2023
How to Play:
Grab a player board, choose a ‘Leader’ for your clan of Celtae (offering a tiny bit of strategic focus for the game ahead and some possible endgame VP), take a green ‘farmer’, a yellow ‘builder’ and a red ‘soldier’ and… off we go.
We’re in reasonably straightforward rondel territory with this one – and only four spaces on this small rondel. Move just one space and get a bonus ‘strength’, move two spaces for no bonus at all and finally move three spaces but find yourself having to pay three strength for the privilege. Ouch.
The four available spaces on the rondel are straightforward enough too:
• Farm: Gain cards from a shared display – crucially these cards have both a unique colour and a unique symbol on them.
• Build: Give up cards of a matching colour from your hand to place a ‘building’ disc from your player board onto an equivalently coloured space out on the main board. The more often you build though, the more cards you must ‘pay’ from your hand each time.
• Battle: As much as you may have been hoping to use the cards in your hand for their colours to Build, maybe you might choose to use the symbols on the cards – trading in a stack of matching symbols for strength to do ‘battle’.
…before I touch on the final (and equally straightforward) ‘Recruit’ action, let me quickly flag up the ‘worker-swapping’ mechanism that drives much of Celtae and gives each of your turns some major pause for thought.
Remember those three workers you started the game with (a green farmer, yellow builder and a red soldier)? They ‘power’ your turns. Have one green farmer – well that means your farmer can take one card from the display. Have two or three though and you can take two or three cards! Have one yellow builder? That’s great, you can use one less card than you might otherwise have needed to build. Have two or three yellow builders? Two or three less cards needed to build… you get the idea.
Each time you move on the rondel, prior to taking your action you are allowed to swap one of your own three workers for one of three workers in the location on the main board that you have just moved to. Choices, choices, choices – “do I give up my red soldier now for a green farmer as I want to take the farm action but aaarrrgh, on my next turn I was hoping to take a super big battle turn so I really need as many of those red soldiers as I can lay my hands on.” Nice.
Helping you with those choices is the final space you can visit:
• Recruit: Place one of the three coloured workers from your hand permanently onto your player board and then draw your hand back up to three available workers. Yay, you now have a total of four workers powering up your actions – the three in your hand that you can still use to ‘worker swap’ during your game and the one now permanently embedded into your player board. Eagle eyed readers might have spotted in some of the photos here that there seem to be some blue workers in photos of the game. Yep, you are right – these blue workers power up the Recruit action. Have one blue worker at your disposal and now you can add one additional worker onto your player board.
Each time you make one full revolution around the rondel; the game’s inbuilt timer ticks down. Take a ‘progress marker’ from those that are lined up to the side of the main board and place it on one of a variety of strategic objectives that were set up at the start of the game – goals such as ‘have built in a certain area’ or ‘have recruited a certain type and number of worker onto your player board’. These will score you points at the end of the game so make sure you are placing them out onto goals that you’re sure you are going to reach. Once all the progress markers have been placed then it’s the end of the game.
Points are scarce in Celtae (more on that later) but when they do come they largely come from; the strategic goal on the Leader that you started the game with, the strategic goals that you placed those ‘progress markers’ onto, tiles claimed for being the last person to build in a particular area, claiming tiles when you successfully battle, incremental points on your player board if you have managed to do a lot a certain thing like recruiting or building. An explosive point salad this ain't though – despite all the different ways to score, you can expect your end game scores to be in the 20 to 30 range!
There are a few additional mechanical wrinkles that I have glossed over in that simplistic overview – but not many. Celtae is a quick playing, easy to understand medium-light game.
Solo Headlines:
I know that there are a good amount of solo players out there that just don’t enjoy games that don’t see you competing against an automated, point scoring opponent so it's worth noting upfront that if that is you and the idea of beat your own score / reaching scoring thresholds is a turn off then you might want to look away now. I think you’d be missing out on an enjoyable solo optimisation puzzle but each to their own!
For those of you that have stuck around, there’s a really nice solo game to enjoy here. Firstly, it’s a quick player – probably around the 30 to 40-minute mark if that. However, its quickness and the fact that it's on the lighter side of medium weight doesn’t mean that there isn’t something substantive to sink your teeth into. There are some excellent decisions to be made, some tight decisions at that and it’s a game that leaves you aching for a turn or two more.
Yes, you aren’t playing against a point scoring opponent – but the solo mode has enough going on that it feels like its interfering in your path to victory, presenting opportunities that you might not have considered, thwarting your plans and just generally making the cogs in your mind whirl twice as hard.
It’s a devilishly simple solo mode - a two-sided wheel that is rotated during the game and each quarter of the wheel has actions that the solo mode will try to take if it is able. Start the game with the wheel facing either way up and then just flip a card from general main deck (you remember, the cards that have colours and symbols on them). Does the card you’ve just drawn match colour with the card on the top of the discard pile? If so, move around the rondel twice. If it doesn’t match just move around the rondel once. Does the symbol on the card match with the last card drawn? Alright, move the solo action wheel around twice to decide what actions to take. Doesn’t match? Ok turn the action wheel only once. The solo turns take seconds and further add to an already quick and snappy (and satisfying) experience.
There is also a nice bit of a ‘meta’ game going on too – this isn’t a case of being able ‘solve’ the solo mode per se and bend it to your will BUT you do know that the solo mode is only going to take one or two moves around the rondel and you know that it can only take one of two visible sets of actions. You have zero control over which of those will happen BUT you can somewhat plan and at least see what actions it CAN'T be taking and the locations that it WON'T be visiting this turn. In such a short and tight game, every tiny bending of the solo mode to your will is going to be needed. Talking of tightness…
The phrase ‘beat your own score’ maybe isn’t the most appropriate here. There are three levels of difficulty to try and beat – 25 points for an Easy win, 30 points for Normal and 35 points for any of you utter legends out there that are able to tackle such heady heights. These points thresholds are tough! You are definitely going to sweat for every point and even that ‘easy’ 25-point threshold is a reach. I’m reminded of the (heavier) game Newton here – a reasonably straightforward, quick and snappy game to play but wow, one difficult game to score well at! Things are just a tricky here in Celtae – easy to learn, hard to ‘get good’.
Great fun trying though!
General Headlines:
Well, that front cover is rather striking, isn’t it? What a stunning portrait from The Mico which certainly makes you take a second glance for sure. The artwork inside the box is vibrant and colourful too but perhaps that overly striking cover lulls you into thinking that there might be a ‘Garphillesque’ sized cast of cartoon characters inside the box to bring the game to life. There isn’t anything quite as striking as that front cover, so you might need to manage your expectations a tiny bit - but was in offer inside is still visually more than charming.
A note of caution, however. Celtae is one helluva abstract game. The artwork is fun, it's all colourful and the graphic design is really intuitive. But ‘Farming’ = gain some cards, ‘Building’ = trade similar colour cards to place a disc out on the main board, ‘Battling’ = trading cards with the same symbol to gain 'strength' to claim a tile, ‘Recruiting’ = lose some discs to gain a wild disc. Super, super abstract - the theme could be space, medieval, war, robots....anything.
BUT WHAT A GREAT LITTLE ABSTRACT PUZZLE IT IS!!!
Ok, it's certainly lighter than my usual medium heavy preferences but that isn’t to say that that Celtae is lacking tension or chewy decisions – quite the opposite in fact. It’s a compact, focussed, quick playing head squeezer! Having only four spaces on the rondel might seem reductive but less is absolutely more here. Where some other games might hurt your head by the sheer volume of spaces and places to visit, Celtae brings the burn by begging of you to figure out how best to optimise your turns with only four spaces to visit.
…and for a game with only four available actions to take Celtae has a surprising amount of variability. During set-up a range of strategic objectives are laid out for everyone to work towards – and you just know you are going to have to blend, chase and smash them as best as you can. Might you be needing to build a lot? Perhaps building a specific colour of building? Maybe you’ll be battling a fair bit but also trying to recruit a certain type of worker? A lot of these objective are “have more of XY&Z than your opponent” which adds more than a bit of tug of war tension – particularly in such a tight game where you are trying every turn to wring blood out of a stone / push as hard as possible to optimise every single action / grind for every measly last point.
I will say that while those variable strategic objectives are excellent and combine for some nice replayability - sometimes they can fall out during set up more than complementing each other a fair bit. For such a tight game, a serendipitous set-up can mean the difference between a win or loss for the solo player so there is a small element of luck of the draw here. But with such a quick game, even when you lose (and be prepared to lose!) there is still more than enough time left to reset and go again. Celtae is a great choice for those that want an easy setup, an easy ruleset to internalise, fancy a quick game to play and quick game to pack away. Or perhaps not to pack away but instead have that splendid “lets immediately reset and play that one again now” moment.
At a Glance:
Celtae brought a smile to my face during a recent board gaming lull. It’s a fun, quick-playing solo optimization puzzle that doesn’t require a long time to (re)learn. Highly recommended for those looking for a lighter, abstract yet still more than puzzly affair.
• Quick and easy ruleset
• Plays in about 30 minutes with a “just one more game” feel
• Tight gameplay requiring optimization of every action
• Simple beat your own score solo mode that’s challenging to beat.
• Surprising variability in strategic objectives despite only four available actions
• Very abstract – don’t expect the theme to burst through here despite some nice artwork.
Final Score:
7.5* out of 10 (Reviewed after 8 plays)
* Bump this up to an 8 out of 10 if you prefer medium-light games. I generally prefer something a good chunk heavier and ‘sprawling’ but regardless, this is a very enjoyable game.
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