Can I have too many gripes if I buy a game solely on the basis that it ‘looks like it scratches my dry, beige Euro itch’ and it turns out to be too dry and too beige? Seemingly so…
Gentes
Designer: Stefan Risthaus
Publisher: TMG / Gamebrewer
2017
How to Play:
Broadly speaking you are aiming throughout the course of Gentes to:
• Gain cards from a main display into your hand - cards that represent structures and monuments.
• Play those cards from your hand to create your civilisation – each card having a unique ‘population’ cost required to play it. Once played you may get VP, immediate or ongoing bonuses as well as the potential to earn additional VP by playing cards that feature similar symbols to others that you may have already played.
• In order to play those cards you are going to have to grow your population sufficiently – you aren’t going to be playing a card that requires 4 Priests if you only have 3 of them at your disposal now are you?!
• Build – gain an immediate bonus (points, money and more) from the spot on the main board map that you have chosen to build on, trigger the bonuses too of all of the other spaces in the same region. Perhaps though you might want to think about building in a different region as at the end of each round you will get a bonus from one spot in each of the distinct regions that you have previously built in.
How do you gain cards, build, increase your population etc? Just grab the relevant action tile from the main board and place it on your individual player board. Once the action has been taken then it can’t be used again that round.
Each action will have a monetary cost but will also have a time cost represented by hourglass symbols. So for example, say I wanted to take the ‘build’ action. I have a choice of a couple of tiles that will let me build. One will invariably be cheaper than the other from a monetary point of view so I might think it’s worth taking that cheaper build action so that I have more money to spend on later turns. Good times. But those cheaper actions come at a greater overall cost - they have hourglasses printed on them which mean I have to take the displayed number of hourglass tokens and place them onto my player board in a space or spaces that would have otherwise been able to hold another action tile during a future turn. I can only hold a certain amount of things on my player board - I don’t want these pesky hourglass tokens. I want instead to have lots of those useful tiles that let me take actions instead. The more actions I am able to take the more successful I am going to be. Hmmm, maybe I should pay more money to take the same action but with a lower amount of hourglasses. You get the idea.
Take your turn, decide which action to take, mull over whether to take a cheaper version of that action or a pricier one that comes with fewer hourglasses. Eventually your cumulative actions and hourglasses will reach the end of the track on your playerboard which brings about the end of the round. You have six of those rounds; grow your population, play some cards, get some bonuses for perhaps building or developing your civilisation quickly, grab some resources along the way, string a couple of combos together as you go.
Don’t expect any end of game VP surprises - instead you will slowly and incrementally be gaining the vast majority of points throughout the game, a game that through the use of different decks of cards that are used during different ‘eras’ of the game feels itself like it is growing incrementally.
There is more under the hood on this one – I would encourage you as ever to have a look at the rulebook or a playthrough video to see some of the nuance behind how some of those mechanisms work. But this is firmly in medium weight Euro territory with quite straightforward ‘get cards / try to get to a point of being able to play those cards / do some general other stuff along the way / juggle whether to take cheaper actions or more expensive actions / try to do it all within a set number of turns’ stuff.
General Headlines:
Rulebooks are a subjective beast I suppose, and I often find people having a moan about a rulebook and thinking to myself “well I thought it was perfectly fine”. So take it with a pinch of salt but I will say that that this rulebook felt frustrating enough for me to mention it here. Gentes is quite straightforward – a couple of the mechanisms have a little more meat to them that need a bit of additional explanation. But other than the slight increase in up front rules explanation for those couple of mechanisms, Gentes should be quite an easy learn - at least for those used to playing medium / mid-heavy Euro games. Maybe I was having a bad day but crikey, the rulebook makes things tough with some head scratching moments that just aren’t clear at all. That said, once I had finally tackled learning the game, I didn’t find myself particularly needing to reference the rulebook again.
On to the game itself. I don’t agree with the lazy stereotyping of Euro games being devoid of theme, theme being pasted on to a random mish mash of mechanisms, glorified cube pushing, spreadsheets to be filled out etc. That said I will confess that often as a Euro player my enjoyment of a theme in a game is secondary to my enjoyment of the mechanics. But at their best, Euros should be a real marriage between theme and mechanisms. For me however, Gentes felt too abstract…
There were a couple of mechanisms in the game that I enjoyed – namely taking the building action and deciding where on the map to build, knowing that if I focus on one area of the map then I can trigger an immediate combo and gain resources from all of the other places that I already built in that area. Or do I diversify, build in different lands, gain smaller immediate rewards but know that at the end of the round I am going to be able to gain resources from one space in each of the three different lands that I have built in. Some nice food for thought. I also liked the way that gaining cards from the display or boosting your population worked – I can spend my action to gain one, two or three items depending where they are located in the display. I could get that one card that I really really want but its quite expensive or I could get two cheaper cards worth more points in the long run but perhaps not what I immediately hoped for. Again, some good decisions to be had. The ‘hourglass’ costs of individual actions also gave some reasonable moments to ponder – if I take an action that has a cheaper monetary costs it is likely going to mean that I now have fewer actions to take this round or have a knock on effect into the number of available actions that I have next round.
Overall though, I felt that actions were too abstract - other than the slightly colourful map on the board giving something visual to focus your eyes on, action tiles are just plonked into grey spaces on the board that don’t have any real thematic back story other than ‘this is where you take those tiles from’. The population that you try to increase is made up of characters such as priests, nobles and soldiers but their thematic roles don’t (as far as I could tell) have any implications on the game itself which made me stop concerning myself with the characters and instead just seeing them crudely as numbers. Similarly with the civilization that I am trying to build using cards: I quickly stopped looking at the artwork which felt incidental and instead concerned myself solely with the numbers on the cards. Things felt too dry. Others may find themselves in arid heaven. But for me Gentes just felt like I had some tiles, cards and numbers that I was moving around but with little thematic investment other than a mild pretence that I was building a civilisation of sorts.
Solo Headlines:
The front of the rule book clearly states the game as having a player count of 2-4 players. Ok, the rulebook does also have a section at the back for solo play but I’m already suspecting before I even turn to it that the solo mode might be an afterthought….
For scaling, the solo game only uses a fraction of the action tiles from the multiplayer game. I get this, you don’t want to be having access to all of the actions that a four player game would. The eight or so actions that you have to choose from in the solo game provide tight enough decision making about what optimum moves to take rather than having the freedom to choose from a vast plethora of actions. My gripe isn’t that there is a narrow amount of actions to take in the solo game, its that there is no competition for those actions – they remain available for me to take without any fear that they might be removed from the game which could see my careful planning fall to pieces. I can see this being a tasty part of the multiplayer experience – nervously sitting through other players turns praying that they don’t take the action that you desperately have your eyes on; the soaring highs when the turn comes back around to you and your action is still available; the crushing lows when another plays snaffles the exact tile that you were just about to choose. In the solo game I miss having to pivot. I miss my plans needing to change. Instead I have free access to all actions at all times - the task instead being how I optimally use those actions. Which is fine I guess – I just missed the tension and the drama in the action selection. Ok, there is a little bit of competition for cards that you can choose each round (you have to burn some from the display each round) but this didn’t feel like it was there to make me pivot by removing cards that I desperately wanted - instead it felt more like cards were being burned just to refresh the display to give me access to new cards and choices.
I know some solo players are wedded to the idea of needing a point scoring automa mimicking the multiplayer experience. I’m not one of those. It depends on the game I guess, but my gaming preferences often lead me to seeking out and playing games that are the definition of multiplayer solitaire with limited to no player interaction other than some mild competition for actions, spaces and resources. So beat your own score often work just fine for me – but I admit that I like to have at least something else underpinning it –some kind of win condition, some kind of extra flavour, some kind of something. Here though, in keeping with the overall dryness of the game (and perhaps that early warning that this is a game for 2 – 4 players), I just have a standard ‘take your own turns and if you score between 70 – 80 you are a beginner, 80- 90 you are doing better’ type fare. Its fine. Its just not particularly exciting – more a case of simply playing the base game single handed as opposed to a solo mode that has particularly been given some bespoke thought and attention. Perhaps some of the solo challenges on BGG forums might offer the additional focus for the solo game that I thought was missing. But out of the box there just wasn’t enough of a pull to make me want to keep playing.
That said, Gentes does provide the bones of a good optimisation puzzle. It felt devoid of any excitement, tension, pivots and meaningful theme for me. But if ‘grabbing some abstract tiles to get some numbers to lay cards of equivalent numbers / trying to make some abstract symbols match along the way / giving some thought to periodically needing to get resources so that you can do more of the numbers and symbols stuff / doing all of that within a set amount of turns’ is your thing, then you will enjoy this game a lot. That sounds like a barbed compliment. It genuinely isn’t meant to be. I think there will be people that go eyes wide open into this game knowing exactly what it is going to do – and they will get exactly what they want from it and really enjoy trying to eek out the highest score that they can. Its just for this solo player ‘how can I get the most points using largely the same set up and conditions game to game’ just got a little tiresome quite quickly.
Solo game plays in about 50 – 60 mins, no significant alterations to the base rules, minimal (near zero) upkeep between rounds. A quick, straightforward play.
At a Glance:
+ Those that like an optimisation puzzle in its purest sense might find things to like here.
+ Some interesting decision spaces in the game - particularly trying to squeeze as many turns out of each round as possible.
+ The Build action in the game has some scope for nice combos - or at least had the rumblings of theme
- Theme feels so abstract that at times I was simply looking at nothing more than matching numbers and occasionally matching symbols
- Solo mode doesn’t feature competition for action tiles that the multiplayer game does and suffers as a result with limited tension or pivots.
- A very dry beat your own score solo mode that comes off the back of an already very dry game. And prior to this I didnt think that I minded dry games...
Final Score:
5 Out of 10. (I would likely give this a 6 out of 10 if I was playing multiplayer as I can easily see the competition for actions providing a little more drama and tension throughout the game).
Game Brewer Standard Edition. Reviewed after 5 plays.
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