Less of a review and more a confession: I didn’t play this one nearly enough to warrant calling it a ‘review’ as I realised quite quickly that it just wasn’t the game for me. Glen More II: Chronicles isn’t a bad game by any stretch of the imagination but if I share some of the reasons why it didn’t click for me, you never know – it might end up sounding like just the game for you.
Glen More II: Chronicles
Designer: Matthias Cramer
Solo Design: Automa Factory
Publisher: Funtails
2019
How to Play:
(Please Note: in order to play the official solo mode of this game, the Highland Games expansion is required)
Base game:
Expanding your Scottish clan (the briefest explanation of a theme you’ll likely ever hear!), players will take turns to move around a rondel of tiles - choosing to a) move as many spaces ahead as you like to b) claim whichever tile that you like. You certainly don’t want to be going too far ahead though as ‘next player’ in the turn order is the person who is furthest behind on the rondel. Streak ahead to get that juicy tile you want = gift your opponent lots of other turns as they catch back up with you!
The tiles on the rondel are comprised of:
• Village tiles: You start the game with a home village tile and a lone Scotsman. Any future village tile that you take from the rondel needs to be placed orthogonally adjacent to one of the tiles you already have, as well as adjacent (orthogonally or otherwise) to one of your Scotsman. You then get to activate the benefit of the tile you have just placed as well as all of the other tiles adjacent to it (orthogonally or otherwise). Those benefits might include gaining specific resources (you can store up to three on any one tile), gaining more Scotsmen into your village, being able to move your Scotsmen around (and as a result affecting where future tiles may be placed), trading some of your resources for victory points, converting resources into whiskey barrels, building a new castle which awards you a landscape tile which will have some immediate or ongoing bonuses etc etc. Take a tile, legally place the tile, take the benefits of it and all adjacent tiles, wait until everyone has jumped ahead of you on the rondel before being able to take another turn and do it all again. Pretty straightforward core set of rules – albeit with a decent amount of decisions to make turn to turn.
• Person tiles: As well as taking those village tiles, you will frequently be able to take a ‘person’ tile – famous Scottish historical figures – to add into a separate collection which will be scored during periodic scoring rounds (more on that in a moment). When you take a person tile, you are able to claim a one-time or ongoing bonus from a separate ‘clan’ board. You can grab a bonus for free if its connected to your starting space on the clan board but If you want to travel further afield from that starting space (or from a space that you have already previously claimed) to reach a juicier bonus then you will need to pay an increasing amount of coins to travel through the connected spaces
As Village / Person tiles are claimed from the rondel they are replaced from four stacks (lettered A, B,C & D). As soon as each stack empties a scoring phase takes place. However, instead of scoring how well you have personally done – you’ll instead score for how much more you have of a variety of things comparable to the player that has the least of those things:
• Whiskey barrels gained or produced
• Scotsmen stood in their home castle (a tricky feat when you are also having to think about moving Scotsmen around your village to be able to legally place tiles adjacent to them)
• The number of Person tiles collected
• The number of landscape cards collected (I don’t think I mentioned landscape cards earlier – some of the village tiles let you claim a landscape card which will offer a bonus as well as counting towards this scoring objective).
In the fourth and final scoring phases you also LOSE three VP for every tile in your village that you have more than the player with the least - so while getting more and more tiles throughout the game is beneficial as you get their bonuses and trigger big combos from all the adjacent tiles that you place tiles alongside, you can’t go too crazy and build a huge village or else you are going to be roundly punished at the end of the game.
At your disposal throughout the game is a neat little market in the centre of the rondel that lets you use coins (you start with X amount depending on the turn order at the start of the game) to buy one or more of the games resources to use during your turn. Or perhaps even sell / trade some of your current hoard of resources for coins for something else that you need. As the market is used, costs increase so it’s not going to be a permanent solution to any ongoing resource needs – but it can get you out of some tricky spots from time to time!
Chronicles:
The game also comes with 8 ‘Chronicles’ (and even more in the Highland Games expansion from which the solo mode comes) – modular expansions to the base game. I won’t go into depth on each Chronicle here – you may wish to have a look at the rulebook to get a better idea of what those Chronicles offer but as an example, the first chronicle - ‘Highland Boat Race’ - places a river and boats alongside your village and a tile that when randomly pulled from the usual stack triggers a race which sees you using the movement points that you would normally be using to move your Scotsman around your tiles to instead move your boats along the river, claiming bonuses along the way as well as a hefty prize if you win the race.
The Chronicles offer differing complexities and can be mixed and matched and its recommended that only a maximum of two are played together at any one time - though I am sure there are many that have added more than the recommendation.
Solo Headlines:
What a task and a half for the well-respected Automa Factory to try and create a solo mode for a game that needs to be playable ‘as is’ but equally be able to handle a random mish mash of lots of very distinct modular expansions (Someone better at maths can tell us in the comments section the number of potential combinations I am sure). And there is no doubt that they pull off a minor miracle here in achieving an excellent balance of something that is both consistent and reasonably straightforward to operate.
Another hurdle to try and jump is the need to create an Automa that doesn’t just gain more and more random, incremental points. In a game that has those quite distinct scoring phases where players gain points dependent on how well they are doing comparatively, the Automa crucially needs to know what the human player is doing well or not in so that it can catch up if its lagging behind on any area or streak ahead where its winning – no point at all for it to be unintelligently pursuing just one strategy – players would just then focus on everything else that it is not doing. It has to react and pivot as much as the human player. Again, another minor miracle achieved.
In practice, your Automa opponent - ‘The MacNificent’ - uses a separate and unique board and a deck of cards. The MacNificent’s board holds the tiles and resources that it collects during its turns, along with four of its own tiles which are randomly ordered to indicate its preference of strategic choices – so for example, it might prefer to gain person tiles, followed by castle tiles, followed by whiskey barrel tiles. You get the idea. During each of the games interim scoring phases the order of these tiles will change depending on how well or not it is performing in relation to you.
Its turns are quick: Flip one of its card over and work through it top to bottom
• See how many spaces in front of where its player marker is on the rondel that it will considering taking a tile from
• Choose the tile that it prefers as displayed on the card
• If no preferred tiles are available choose instead its preference from those randomly ordered ‘strategy’ tiles on its player board that I mentioned earlier.
• If none of its preferred tiles are available for it to take then instead take the tile X number of spaces ahead of it.
The Automa cards also have a symbol on them to telling you when to refer to a separate (and just as straightforward) card for each of the Chronicles that you might have added into your base game.
Draw a card > quickly scan for its preferred move > if the card references a Chronicle then quickly scan that Chronicle card to see what Chronicle specific move it also takes.
In addition to the Automa, a separate die on the board acts as a basic third dummy player of sorts – it very quickly and crudely just removes some additional tiles (and more often than not – exactly the tile that you probably had your eye on. Aaargggh).
I can’t technically fault The MacNificent – it’s a quick to run and intelligent opponent which nine times out of ten is all I really ask for. However there are a few things about the solo mode (and the game generally) that just don’t sing to my personal preferences - but I shall chew those over in more detail as I ramble aimlessly below about my general thoughts and feelings.
General Headlines:
The first thing that I'd like to make clear is that I just don’t feel like I have given this game enough of a chance for this to be warranted as a ‘review’ – and I didn’t take time at all to explore the many modular Chronicles that change and augment the base game. Regular readers of my reviews (wishful thinking ha!) will know that I do aim for, and indeed pride myself on, a minimum 7 - 10 plays, before committing pen to paper and offering my thoughts. Here though was a rare beast of a game that in spite of prior research I just knew quite quickly wasn’t for me and wasn’t one that I wanted to spend more time playing. That said, I do want to stress that I don’t think this is a bad game by any stretch of the imagination - indeed I can see it being some peoples favourite game and for good reason. It just wasn’t for me – and sometimes that is just fine. You can’t like them all.
The base game is pretty straightforward to learn; move forward to grab a tile, place that tile adjacent to one of the tiles currently in your play area, make sure it is also adjacent to a Scotsman, activate it and all other adjacent tiles. If you instead choose a ‘person’ tile – take one of the bonuses on the separate clan board. Person furthest behind always goes next. Buy or sell stuff from the market. But within that very easy learn is some depth to the gameplay. As you would hope for in a tile placement game, there are a few things to chew on as you navigate the spatial puzzle. Additionally the tiles offer up some potential strategies to focus on - perhaps you’re aiming to do a lot of trading this game, or trying to gain and make whiskey, perhaps turning your attention more to the bonuses on the separate clan board. Some limited, but enjoyable, ‘ok, next game I might try X strategy instead of Y’ moments. That said, I did find myself playing largely the same way game to game - which probably explains why I was roundly between most if not all of the handful of times that I played it. Maybe I should have tried to deviate a little and explore more. Maybe though I prefer games that more forcefully funnel me into exploring different strategies.
That isn’t to say that the game doesn’t present those opportunities to play differently - there are a vast range of tiles available for you to choose from on any given turn, each of them offering different approaches and food for thought. A problem that I found however was that the tiles change so frequently and the ones that you might have had your eye on quickly get snaffled by the Automa (and the 3rd dummy player) that you are constantly having to pivot. Now those regular readers will note that I do like a game that has me pivoting tactically to creep further and further towards my strategic end goal. I just felt in Glen More II that the game was a near permanent pivot and that while I may want to have a certain strategic focus, the frequency of the tiles changing made that all but impossible. So maybe this game will sing more to the tactical fans rather than the strategic ones? I will say though, there were some nice combo moments as tiles were laid and triggered all the tiles around them – seeing a domino effect of bonuses explode is always a treat.
Some players are really going to enjoy the quirkiness of the of how this game scores too – it feels different to my usual Euro games where I incrementally gain VP for doing some stuff throughout the game and then a walloping stack of VP at the end for meeting my strategic objectives. Glen More II took me out of that comfort zone – its 4 scoring phases don’t reward me for how well I have individually done, but how well I have done on a range of things comparatively to the player who has done the least well in those same things. So once again here I am needing to tactically pivot during the game. Solo opponent getting more whiskey barrels? That’s me abandoning my current plans and chasing more barrels. Its stealing lots of Person tiles? I better get another one on my next turn! It felt that if I wasn’t keeping pace with everything the automa as trying to do then I was going to be roundly beaten…
…and roundly beaten I seemed to be on every game. Quite likely due to me not really exploring the game for long enough to be good at it, but I did feel that the solo opponent was especially tricky to beat even on Easy mode. I found this quite disheartening - if I had been getting the buzz of some closely run contests knowing that I had almost beaten the game but just needed one more try, I might have persisted. Instead I was just getting my backside whipped every single time and it didn’t feel good. That might say a lot more about my abilities (or lack of) than the game itself but I suspect the difficultly here is going to be a challenge for other similarly average players like me – and for a game that itself was reasonably mid weight, the ‘challenge to weight’ ratio didn’t feel quite right. Some people might relish a tough opponent however – and more power to you! Maybe give this one a go!
Another complaint was that while the solo automa was clearly smart, clearly easy to run, clearly playing and adapting its games intelligently – when it came to scoring it was just getting points out of nowhere and a lot of them. Not the same kind of points as I was getting. Its own unique points for its own different way of scoring. And again, I stress, lots of them. It’s like there were two different games being played with two different rulesets. It felt unfair. Smart, but unfair. And for me unfair = demotivating. While the Automa is pretty simple to follow and learn I still found myself having to check back regularly on how it was meant to behave on a turn in addition to remembering how I had to behave during a turn. By no means anywhere near as extreme as some other games that I have played though.
Regular readers will also be spitting their coffee against the screen as I take aim at the modular expansions that form the whole crux of this ‘Chronicles’ game. “But you love expansions” they will be shouting. And they are right. I suspect though that what I actually like is those expansions that augment the existing mechanics and once added, I never play without them again (Arnak’s Expedition Leaders, GWT’s Rails to the North – even all of the separate modular expansions for Teotihuacan would probably see me playing it ’all in’ as a rule of thumb). The deep diving, mid heavy euro fan in me just wants one game laid out in front of me to conquer over repeat plays. Here though there are 8+ (12+ when you factor in the Highland Games expansion which is needed to play solo) different variations on the game. Some absolutely might find ‘I wont play the base game without these any more’ Chronicles and I think a lot of people are going to really enjoy exploring them one by one and finding out which ones they like most. I didn’t make it past the first one (an admittedly fun and straightforward boat race that takes place alongside the main game). The idea of working through an additional 12 lots of content for a base game that I already wasn’t buzzing about didn’t particularly appeal.
What also became clear was that for each Chronicle I was going to have to learn new rules. Most looked pretty straightforward but would still need a game or so to try out and get to grips with. But then on top of this there was a new set of rules to learn for how the Automa was going to play each game. Now to be clear, my gripe here is not about the Automa – what an excellent achievement to have a very straightforward system that can be adapted to all of the very different Chronicles. But regardless, here was game that I was finding hard to beat, finding the Automa’s scoring punishingly hard to swallow at times, finding myself needing to learn a new set of rules for each Chronicle and then a further set of rules for the Automa. If it was a base game that I had fallen in love with then I might have pushed through and tried each Chronicle. Instead I gave up knowing that this one just wasn’t for me.
I wonder if I might have enjoyed this one more multiplayer - and whether this game fits into the camp of being a game that has been (well) made to technically be playable solo but is probably at its heart a multiplayer experience. Its telling that a separate expansion is needed to play this solo. I suspect this might be more down to the need to keep costs down as the main game has a lot already in the box and its likely that including the solo mode with the base game might have ramped up the cost? Or maybe it is the case that the solo here is more of an ‘add-on’ to a game that maybe is better left at higher player counts.
On that mention of the volume of stuff that comes in the base game - I picked a copy of this up on the second hand market and everything was already popped and boxed up nicely with a really handy insert that made everything quick and easy to bring to the table. But I would not have enjoyed the task of unboxing this one for the very first time. There is a LOT of content to organise. Make sure you set an evening aside for this alone! But all told the components are great and it’s a high quality production for sure.
Play time? Base game was breezy and around the hour mark. Some of the Chronicles I can see adding 15 mins or so to this but others seemed pretty simple to integrate into the base game and wouldn’t add too much bloat.
At a glance:
A quirky and quite unique feeling game comparatively to other more traditional Euro games that offers a good medium weight experience for those fans of tactical games - as well as a wealth of modular content for those looking to explore, mix, match and discover. While it wasn’t a game that clicked for me – lots of people are going to undoubtedly find a lot to like here.
+ High quality production with excellent components
+ Straightforward to learn but some good decisions to be had in its tile selection and tile placement mechanisms
+ Automa is simple and straightforward and plays an intelligent game
+ / - Lots of content in the box for those that like modular expansions. Perhaps too much for those that don’t.
+ / - Tactical fans are in for a treat. Strategic players perhaps less so.
- Shame the solo mode requires an additional purchase
- Automa is very challenging to beat and feels unfair in its scoring.
Final Score:
6 out of 10 (but it’s definitely going to be someone’s 10!)
Reviewed after 5 plays.
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