Golem

Twelve turns, four rounds, one Rabbi, Golems roaming the streets of Prague and students trying to keep them under control. Tracks, Big Combos and erm, Marbles. If you like classy, mid-heavy Euros with depth, variability and rock solid design from a team with real pedigree and don’t mind things feeling rather mechanical and abstract, you are in for a real treat. Did I mention the marbles?

Golem
Designer: Flaminia Brasini, Virginio Gigli, Simone Luciani
Publisher: Cranio Creations
Released: 2021

How to Play

The main board is broken down in to three coloured horizontal tracks, each (albeit very abstractly) representing a street / area of Prague. You will place three ‘students’ at the start of each street as well as two of your starting Golems on two of those streets.

At the start of each of the four rounds of the game your Golems will be forced to move forward a pre-defined number of spaces further and further away from your students who are endeavouring to catch up with them and keep them under control. As the Golems move forward they land on random, incrementally improving actions that they can take that will benefit your game – perhaps offering points, resources, additional actions etc. So on one hand you really want your Golems to push forwards as much as possible so you can reap the big rewards. The catch is though that at the end of each round you have to pay a cost per space between your Student and your Golems on each street - a nice riff on the ‘feed your workers’ mechanism - and with resources proving tight over what will be only 12 turns in the game you are definitely going to want to do everything you can to not have to pay this cost.

Your Students chase after the Golems largely by you choosing from a selection of randomly placed coloured marbles from a ‘Synagogue’ (again a very abstracted but quirky action selection mechanism). Pick a red marble and your student moves along the red track; blue and it moves on the blue track. You get the idea. The choosing of the marble also lets you take an action depending on which area of the synagogue that you took the marble from – and this makes for some really chewy brain burn (make a note those that suffer from Analysis Paralysis) as you may want to take a coloured marble purely to move your student along to catch up with a Golem, but the associated action of that marble might be one that you have no particular interest in taking as it doesn’t benefit your overarching strategy for the game. Aaaargh.

Talking of those overarching strategies, players also have an individual player board which abstractly (I’m using the word abstract a lot in this review – read into that what you will) represents a Rabbi's workshop. Its broken down into three areas of focus – an area that you can improve your knowledge by gaining books, an area where you can create new Golems and ‘level’ up existing ones, and an ‘artefacts’ area where you can create resources and other benefits. The individual tracks that your Students and Golems move along, as well as the space you take your marbles from in the Synagogue, directly correspond with the areas on your player board – so focus on the Blue street and you improve your Blue ‘knowledge / books’ area of your player board, take a marble from the yellow area of the synagogue and you will be improving your yellow artefacts area on the player board. Again, you get the idea.

You also take one of your three turns per round by placing a Rabbi marker on an action space, with the player choosing the uppermost action going first next round.

Drafting Objective Cards at the start of the game that give points at the end of the game will offer some focus on to which strategies and areas you might particularly want to explore.

Points are gained as you progress but the main bulk of points will be awarded at the end of the game for how successfully you have managed to develop the areas of your player boards. The player with the most points… well you know the rest.

General Headlines:

Before I rave about how much I like this game (spoiler: it’s a lot) and how much it scratches some of my key wants and needs in a game, I will say that as much as I like the attempt at theme - this game is as abstract as it gets. I know, I know – it’s a Euro, what do I expect. I don’t mean it as a criticism at all but mechanically, thematically and gameplay wise this feels very abstract. I personally don’t mind that at all. If you are wanting an action selection Euro that aims to give a sense of the sights and smells of Prague then you might want to be getting Praga Caput Regni off the shelf instead. If you are wanting an absolutely cracking puzzle that happens to mention Prague somewhere in the rulebook then you are in the right place.

The other heads up is that there are a LOT of symbols in this game. Everywhere. Doing different things. The majority are reasonably intuitive, but some will have you reaching for the rule book or even combing the rules section of BGG. They all become second nature after a couple of games but do expect your first game to be a little rough and the Appendix section of your rule book to get more than a little worn.

I’m also conscious that I am commenting as a largely solo player (more specific solo thoughts later) and I do think that downtime in this game might drag significantly at 4p. But again, I don’t think that is unique to just this Euro….and this is a review from a solo perspective. But worth noting regardless.

That all out the way:

Wow. I love this game.

I could keep this permanently on the table – and as I type there aren’t any immediate plans to take it off the table after these first ten plays.

There is so much variability in the set up (warning to those who don’t like a fiddly, long set up), randomness on which actions may or may not be available to you, variability in what starting objective cards and resources you might draft to focus your strategy. Every single game has just felt different to the last which makes me want to play again and again (and again). I might have gone into each game thinking that I want to focus on the thing I did in the previous game to get better at it but the game has another idea and makes me play a whole new way. So on one hand I absolutely have a very clear strategy of what I am aiming to do by the end of the game (and I personally really like this in a game – probably why I also adore Teotihuacan) but on the other hand the randomness of the available actions forces me to be making tactical decisions and pivots at every turn. And those decisions are delicious.

Those decisions are also a real brain burn because despite having only 12 turns in the game, each turn particularly after the first round has the potential to unleash some massive combos very similar I guess to the aforementioned Praga. “If I take those two bits of gold, then I will be able to get those three other resources which will let me buy a book and if I buy that book I can move my golem back two steps which on the next turn will let me build a another golem for free which if I place on that second track I can move it along one space and get those two coins which will let me buy…..”. Really satisfying dopamine hits. But more importantly some real depth to each decision you take so that you ensure that your limited turns eek out the maximum benefits. This is a game where every turn you have to be looking for synergies.

I also love the tension of knowing that you have to try and not let your Golems move too far away from your Students or face having to ‘feed the workers’. This doesn’t feel as punitive as it does in some other games – it genuinely creates lots of challenging decisions about which actions to take at any given time. This is probably the one area of the game that does feel more thematic. For me it’s the USP of the game - a real sense of push and pull between characters that pervades every decision you take.

The decision on which marbles to take is also sublime. Taking a specific colour might move my student along a track but the action that particular marble is associated with may not be the action I want to take. I sit in blissful paralysis on which option to take. Mouth-watering choices at times. Some may feel the use of marbles are superfluous or perhaps that they can be manipulated. I haven’t felt either of those things to any meaningful extent.

Feels like I have achieved something yet ends with me wishing I could have had another turn or two - the game just reeks of class. Yes it feels abstract, yes at times it feel a little bit mechanical, yes there is a lot going on, but man, it 100% feels like it has been designed by people that know how to make superb, replayable and enjoyable Euro games. This game oozes quality.

Solo Headlines:

Flip a card from a deck that the Automa uses and take its action(s) and it will behave like a real player.

Don’t be lulled into thinking things are that straightforward - while the solo automa does a really excellent job of mimicking another player the downside is that it has its own quite detailed rulebook which takes a good while to digest and understand and does feel quite complex after what will have already been quite the investment to understand the base game rules (a tale as old as time for us solo players eh?!). Once you have the solo rules under your belt then they quickly become second nature but expect in the first game or two to need both the main rulebook and the solo rulebook glued your eyelids.

On one hand I cant fault the automa. This one in particular is so cleverly put together and smart and does genuinely feel like I am playing against another player. But herein lies the problem that I have with it. I get that some people prefer an automa over a beat your own score – and indeed in some games it feels crucial that a 2nd player is mimicked by an automa but this game is the epitome of multiplayer solitaire (and that isn’t a criticism). As smooth as this automa is, it still takes a bit of time and too much distraction away from your own game and can feel like I am running an automa for automa sake (other than some minor competition for actions).

Playing against the automa (and admittedly in my solo world I can drift easily into serious periods of AP) I was looking at a games just shy of the 2 hour mark which felt a bit too long when half of it was taking the moves of an automa that wasn’t having much bearing on my own game. After culling some of the automa’s rules and creating this simpler beat your own score variant I found my games coming in at just over the 60 – 75 min mark with few distractions from my own game. And boy did I start enjoying things a whole lot more when I was playing in my hour sweet spot and focused much more on getting my juicy combos rather than how many steps my solo golem needed to move, where and how.

I suppose this will be personal preference. Make no mistake the base and solo games are very, very good and you’ll applaud the smartness of the automa. I just felt that this particular solo game wasn’t crying out for an automa and its actions felt more than a bit distracting to my own game. If you are absolutely wedded to needing an automa though you are still going to like this game a whole lot. Just bear in mind the initial hurdle of needing to learn its rules as they are definitely on the more complex end of the spectrum.

At a glance:

+ Amazing variability and replay value

+ Action selection makes for some very chewy decisions

+ Combos, combos, combos

+ A lot of depth (some may flip this and say “has too much going on” – meh, I like it)

+ You can feel as you play that this has been designed by a team that really know what they are doing.

- Can feel a little abstract at times

- Set up is a chore

- Depth of the Solo Automa feels redundant in a game that is largely multiplayer solitaire

Final Score:

9 out 10 (noting as mentioned in the review that I have stopped playing with the full Automa rules and would perhaps drop my score down to an 8 out of 10 for the solo game otherwise).

Reviewed after 10 plays.