Be honest, the theme and artwork brought you here didn’t it? Don’t worry, the gameplay is pretty good too. Lacrimosa also gets a bonus point for making the question “what shall I listen to in the background” a whole lot easier…
Lacrimosa
Designer: Gerard Ascensi and Ferran Renalias
Publisher: Devir
2022
How to play:
Players take on the role of ‘Wealthy Patron’ sitting in a café, most likely eating something fancy and holding their finest china teacups with their little pinky fingers sticking out. (Confession: the rulebook doesn’t explicitly mention anything about food, teacups or fingers). Joining you in the café is Mozart’s wife, Constantine, and you will spend the five rounds of the game recounting tales of your time with the recently deceased composer with a view to impressing her so that she deems you worthy of making your way into her memoirs as the most significant patron of Mozart’s final work – the Requiem. It’s a bit of a thematic stretch but I shall keep my thoughts on that to myself for now…
Grab a player board and your nine card starting deck. Each multi-use card will have:
• An action displayed at the top
• A resource(s) displayed on the bottom
The game takes place over five rounds (or ‘eras’ of Mozart’s life) with each round consisting of four turns. On your turn you will draw up to your four card hand limit and from those four cards choose:
• a card to place into the top of your player board to determine which action you are going to take
• a second card which you will place into the bottom slot of your player board to determine a resource which you will gain at the end of the round for use in future rounds (and crucially sacrificing this cards action for this round as a result)
The actions displayed on the cards enable you to:
• Travel: The middle ‘map’ section of the main board sees Mozart and yourself moving across Europe visiting various cities as you go. You can move as far as you want as long as you can pay the monetary cost for doing so. After you have travelled you will land on a tile that either gives you an immediate bonus or a tile that might award you some objectives to try and achieve by the end of the game for some victory points. Any travel tiles that are left on the board at the end of the round get flipped over to display a stronger version with a greater reward – incentivising you to scoop them up in future rounds.
• Document Memories: Grab a more powerful action card from the shared market at the top of the board once you have paid its cost. A little bit of deck building going on to make future turns a bit spicier.
• Commission an Opus: That shared market along the top of the board will also contain ‘Opus’ cards. Same as when you do that Document Memories action, pay the cost depending on the cards location, gain its immediate VP and pop the Opus card to one side near your player board. Its going to come in handy…
• Perform or Sell Music: Take this action to either ‘perform’ one of your Opus cards – keeping the card but gaining a small bonus (usually ‘ducats’ the games currency) - or ‘sell’ it instead, burning the card but getting a larger immediate bonus (usually VP and money)
• Requiem: The bottom third of the main board sees you taking musical notes from your player board, paying to place them to abstractly complete Mozart’s Requiem - claiming a ‘composer’ tile as you go which will offer either an immediate or ongoing bonus. This Requiem action will see you tussle over the course of the game for area majority in the hope of gaining a good chunk of end game VP.
Most, if not all of those actions will require to use coins (‘ducats’) and one of three different ‘story point’ resources (starting your game with two of each already):
1. Talent: pay for and use Opus cards
2. Journey: pay for travel tiles and their lovely bonuses
3. Composition: you’ll be needed these to be staking your claim at the lower ‘Requiem’ end of the board
….so not only are you having to give good thought on which actions you play each round, you also have to give good thought to which actions you are going to sacrifice and instead use those cards to plan your resources for the next round.
After four turns you will do some end of round housekeeping - card market is refreshed, new era specific cards are brought in to play, receive income from ongoing bonuses, grab all of the resources displayed on the four cards from the bottom of your player board that you used in that previous round and you are good to go again. After five rounds, you will count up the VP you will have scored during the game, any goals that you have fulfilled from gained travel tiles, VP from how well you contributed to the Requiem and hopefully you will have the most VP and have made Mozart’s wife happy. Finish your tea, leave the café.
Solo headlines:
Lacrimosa is a snappy game – turns are fast and the medium weight doesn’t bog you down with analysis paralysis. As a result the solo mode really needed to keep things simple so that the pace of the game wasn’t stilted by overly complex bot turns or frequently thumbing through the rule book for rule exceptions. And I am pleased to say that ‘The Soloist’ does a really fine job. Is it perfectly mimicking what another human player might do? Nope. Does it do a fair amount of cheating to score its points? Yup. Is its primary goal mainly to provide competition for cards and tiles and its end game scoring pretty arbitrary? Probably. Am I bothered? Nope – I’m having too much fun playing.
You could write a solo player aid on the back of a match box – or more helpfully I suppose two pages of a rulebook. The Soloist has its own deck of cards that are adjustable for difficulty (three levels of difficulty. I found the medium setting challenge enough – winning half of the games I played). Flip its first card and it will show one of the games main actions, flip another which tells you where to take that action. Quick, quick, quick at a glance stuff, with very little rules overhead and little to no upkeep during the game. You’ll be keeping this one of the right side of an hour or less. It’s a simple, quick step up from a Beat Your Own Score mode that gives some façade of competing at least for end game points with another entity.
I have one small complaint with the solo game however. Not a complaint about the solo bot which I think is perfectly fine and more a complaint about the amount of housekeeping that needs doing between rounds. There is a fair bit – card market being refreshed, new era cards coming out, tiles flipping, new tiles coming out, gaining your end of round resources in preparation for the next round. I won’t say that the housekeeping takes as long as the round itself, but during a very snappy game where you find a nice flow you really feel the end of round brakes coming on sharply. I can see that in a multiplayer game this will be less of an issue with “you take care of the cards each round and I will sort the tiles” roles being assigned to each player. When it’s just little old me at the table then that housekeeping feels just a smidgeon too much. I got faster at everything after a few plays, but even then the housekeeping was noticeable. It certainly wouldn’t dissuade me from grabbing this game off the shelf or in recommending it solo. It’s a minor grumble.
General Headlines:
Let’s get the theme out of the way first of all. It’s certainly an attention grabber and feels pretty unique. The box art on its own is enough to pique the curiosity and when everything is on the table you have a muted but fitting palette with intriguing artwork throughout its icons, cards, tiles and boards. Inevitably in a Euro game, things are going to feel quite abstract but this does a really good job of making things feel ‘Mozarty’ (is that even a word?!) That said, there is more than a disconnect between its stated theme of sitting in a café with Mozart’s wife, recalling tales from his life etc. I treated this narrative instead as just a little bit of (nice) scene setting and then just cracked on with doing some of ‘the Mozart stuff’. However, I particularly enjoy games that are based on real life events which add some trivia to my pub quiz lexicon and Lacrimosa gave me insights into some of the composers of the time, tales in the rulebook about Mozart’s wife and sister, spending time listening to the Requiem as I played the game. Wonderful.
And while yes, the art and components are excellent here – folding double layered player boards, screen printed wooden components etc, I do have one grumble. The main board is vertical (which I have no issue with) - however there is a large stack of cards and tiles that need to be placed on the board and as a result they obscure the line of sight substantially to the costs associated with purchasing cards at the top of the board. Nothing that can’t easily memorised of course or getting out of my seat to take a peak – its not the end of the world. I just can’t help feel that someone signed off on it knowing there was an issue and went ahead regardless. Perhaps I am particularly sore about it given how superb everything else looks and feels. Grumble over.
Lacrimosa sits firmly in the medium weight category. At its core it’s absolutely a case of either grab some cards, do a bit of travelling or try to add musical notes to the area control at the bottom of the board. It’s an easy game to grasp. But this isn’t on the lighter side of medium despite the simplicity and swiftness of its turns – there is still a good amount of tightness and mechanisms intertwining here to give you more than a few headaches. You aren’t awash with resources at all in this game and in the early turns it’s easy to be deceived into thinking ‘great, I’ll do X and then quickly do Y, and then buy Z’. You then run out of resources, start noting the escalating costs of things as the board resets after each round and you are soon getting to that sweet spot of wanting to do things but realising that you just can’t afford to. Credit to the designers too – I think they could have easily added in a few more mechanisms here to make this game heavier and more complex but they resisted and kept the balance right in making things pretty simple to play but having just enough to make you feel like you have played something a little crunchier.
As much as a I like the ‘travel as far as you want, if you can afford it’, the clever action selection, the simple deck building and more - it’s the excellent area majority at the lower third of the board which really shines for me. At first glance it might look like a ‘I have the most pieces there so I win that area and get the most points’ situation – and to some extent it is that. However, there is a lot more to think about here; ‘can I afford to go into a particular area where I really want to be or am I restricted to a cheaper space that I wasn’t really considering; I might be able to get into a space that I have had my eye on – but wait, there are only violin spaces left and I only have a choir and an organ to place….urgh, the other player is too far ahead in that area its pointless me even trying so I need to focus elsewhere.’ It’s a really good puzzle of what you can place, where you can place it, whether you can afford to place it and whether the other player has already placed stuff there. Very good.
I also appreciated a good amount of replayability and depth to explore on this one. I can see some people perhaps feeling that the simplicity of Lacrimosa’s mechanisms might make the game feel repetitive – 'I just grab cards, travel or put musical notes down’ – but there is much more to explore within those core elements. Each game I choose (randomly or otherwise) to have a one of four different composers tiles (and their subsequent bonuses) available to purchase at the bottom of the board. Each composers tiles are unique and encourage me towards a certain style of play e.g. ‘what's the point on focussing too heavily on travel this game when the composer tiles are going to reward me in the pursuit of opus cards’. The travel tiles on the main board are randomly placed and some will serendipitously complement your game, others will provide some good food for thought along the lines of “oh, I wasn’t going to do that but cant resist given I am so close to that tile”. Not all cards are played each game, and those that are get added to the display randomly; each round also has an end of round bonus to nudge you even more eg 'get extra VP for each travel action that you took this round'. The area control at the bottom of the board changes each game thanks to certain spots being blocked differently game to game. There are also some nice combos that creep up occasionally – 'ooh that tile will reward me with extra VP if I have certain types of cards – let me grab another two of that type of card, hopefully grab that tile and then watch my VP explode’. There is more than enough game here to warrant repeat plays.
Despite any flaws (and I don’t think that there are too many) my overarching feeling every time I played Lacrimosa was “I really enjoyed that”. And for that alone I am glad it has made its way into the collection, and I hope if it makes its way into yours that you find it equally as enjoyable.
At a Glance:
+ Unique theme, great artwork and components.
+ Fast, snappy turns that don’t bog you down in analysis paralysis but provide enough to get the brain whirring.
+ Excellent take on area majority that offers more than just ‘have the most things by the end’ to think about.
+ Quick and simple to operate solo mode. It might not mimic a player authentically but provides enough competition at least.
+/ - Streamlined medium weight - the game doesn’t feel bloated by too many intertwining mechanisms. Fans of heavier games might want more however.
- Too much end of round housekeeping for solo players
- Sightline issues with the vertical board that leave me grumpy that someone signed them off.
Final Score:
8 out of 10 (Reviewed after 8 plays).
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