Messina 1347

A bleak theme of rats, death, plague and fire. A gruelling toil of a game where at times things feel utterly frustrating. A game that takes longer than usual to ‘click’. A game where if your timings are out then you are going to be roundly punished. A game that I really shouldn’t like. Instead, Messina 1347 turns out to be an absolutely brilliant mid-heavy euro that I just cannot stop playing….

Messina 1347
Designers: Raúl Fernández Aparicio, Vladimír Suchý
Publisher: Delicious Games
Released: 2021

How to Play:

Messina 1347 from Raúl Fernández Aparicio and Vladimír Suchý is at its core a Worker Placement and Engine Building game with the two mechanics intertwining excellently:

• The main modular board acts as the Worker Placement side of the game; a collection of randomly placed Hexes representing the town of Messina, each having unique actions which gain you resources (fire, wood and coins) or let you move up tracks or give you the power to purchase buildings and more. Over six rounds, players take their three workers (more might become available later in the game) and can place them on the board taking the action printed on the available hex that they land on. If the hex has a randomly assigned plague cube then players can use any fire that they may have obtained to clear the hex of the plague and move up a track of bonuses / VP for their efforts. Equally, if they aren’t able (or don’t want to) clear the plague from the hex then they will be penalised by gaining a ‘rat’ token which will count against them at the end of the game. I’ll talk about this more later in the main review but crucially at the end of each round workers remain on the board and during the next round can travel / move one hex for free, or further if they pay coins, and take their next action(s). As they move around the board performing their chosen actions and fighting the plague they will also encounter Nuns, Craftsmen and Aristocrats who they will rescue and send off to the countryside.

• Your individual player board doubles as your Estate of Engine Building in the countryside and as your workers rescue those Nuns, Craftsmen and Aristocrats they all end up here. If they were rescued from a Hex that had the plague then naturally they need to go individually into Quarantine Cabins on your Estate – a ‘cool down’ area that will see them eventually come on to your main player board in a couple of rounds. During your Worker Placement shenanigans one of your main actions might be to build some upgrades for these cabins so that the rescued people do some work for you while they are in quarantine and at the end of each round they will then produce resources and / or VP for you rather than just sitting idling the time away frivolously. If you rescued them from a Hex that didn’t have the plague then there is no need for them to go in to Quarantine - they can go straight into their individual areas on the estate and have actions assigned to them that can be triggered by your Workers actions or by track bonuses with some lovely combos to be had at times!

Your workers rescue the people, the people go off and produce you resources, your workers can do more actions with these new resources which rescues more people, which gets you more stuff, which rescues more people….

Towards the later stages of the game once the plague has started to calm down a little, players can purchase wagons to transport their rescued townsfolk from their Estates back to Messina to start repopulating the town – claiming repopulated Hexes as their own and getting a good chunk of the games Victory Points for their efforts.

Player boards are two sided – one providing the standard challenge and the other side of the board providing asymmetric versions that the solo player can use to randomise their games.

At its most basic, that’s about it – although of course, there is a lot more detail going on underneath in what is a most definitely a mid-heavy Euro.

General Headlines:

I found my first couple of games of Messina quite frustrating and my initial response was that I just didn’t like it. Indeed when I played this a couple of times 2p with Mrs Headlines from a Solo Player, an opponent who usually annihilates me in most games - seeing tactics, strategies, synergies and combos like Neo sees the world at the end of The Matrix - her response after 3 games worth of woeful scores was “I just cant see what I am meant to be doing or how I am meant to be doing it or how to string things together. I don’t like this game”. I can see this potentially being quite a similar initial reaction for a lot of players in their first few games. It was almost mine.

Almost.

My hunch was that there was something I was missing and my persistence paid off. This is one of those games where ‘when it clicks, it clicks’. And boy does it click.

What players will soon realise is that this isn’t a game where you can just do anything. You cannot play this as a ‘point salad and move up tracks game.’ The thing is though, that feels inherently confusing as all you can see everywhere are lots of points to be saladed and lots of tracks to be moved around. So when you (or me, or Mrs Headlines) naturally do the things that your eyes tell you to do but they don’t lead to much then you are going to feel very dismayed in a game that already is leaving you with a ‘watch rats kills people with a plague’ taste in your mouth.

This is a game where in addition to the things that you might naturally want to do, there are things that you are going to have to do whether you want to or not, and crucially your timings on when to do them are essential. Get the timings wrong and the game will utterly punish you. It may not have a big wheel in the middle of the board revolving like Tzolk'in, or Barrage or Corrosion making it obvious that time is an important mechanism but time is indeed critical to success here. This game is absolutely about WHEN you do things just as much as WHAT you do and those two things together create a palpable tension throughout the game. You know that feeling you get in a tight Euro when you are just trying to cram in final endgame moves to pull off your masterplan – that rush of “I don’t have enough time to do everything I want”? It’s that feeling but on steroids and during every single round. You are constantly running out of time.

Managed to save some people from the plague in the first two rounds and send them to your Estate, but didn’t upgrade it in time? Well you aren’t going to have an engine built to produce the much needed wood, fire and coins that you are going to need to compete in the game and it’s too late to think about it now. Wanting to repopulate Messina in the later rounds now that the plague has abated? Would have been a good plan if you had been able to purchase some wagons in the last round but you didn’t so there! Wish you had more nuns than aristocrats? There were a good few of them on the board in the last round but they have all succumbed to the plague now and have gone. Unlucky.

Timings. Timings. Timings.

Tension, Tension, Tension.

Thematically things just make sense.

Ok, I get that the theme isn’t the cheeriest; This isn’t a rollick through the jungles of Arnak or grabbing lovely crittery berries from a big tree in Everdell Forest. But I tell you what, the marriage between the mechanical flow of this game and its theme is impressive here and one of the strongest I have seen. Everything thematically make sense; Plague literally comes in on a boat at a dock, plague spreads across the board, you go roaming around the board with fire to fight it, rescuing people along the way. They all go off and recover at your Estate. Some of those people might need to be in quarantine as they were exposed to the plague, some will work on your land. Your wagons will eventually transport them all back over to Messina.

You’re not just placing workers to get some random stuff to do some more random stuff all with a generic theme pasted on. Ok, maybe you are. But everything mechanically here really fits in the telling of the story and vice versa. Whether this more sombre theme is for you however is another question…

Worker Placement is done well...

I like this game’s riff on worker placement - at the end of each round your workers stay on the board instead of (as with many other WP games) being taken back each round. This brings a really good spatial awareness dynamic to your decisions. ‘If I place a worker in a particular spot now, in the next round given that they stay there will they be near other spaces that will be useful to me or otherwise I am going to have to pay valuable coins to travel further away’. Such a nice refreshing twist for me. When I say nice and refreshing I of course mean ‘devious and devilishly thinky’.

The engine building element of the game is very, very tight. Almost frustratingly so. You are never at any point in this game going to feel satisfied with your engine. In fact you start with a grand total of zero things at your disposal – no jumpstarted engine or any idea of how you might even start to get an engine off the ground. You are grinding and toiling for every last resource. Don’t expect at any point to be rolling in vast swathes of resources and having many choices about what you will do with your riches. Your choices here will be about what you may (or more likely, may not) be able to do with your paltry rewards. This again makes for some heavy brain burn and potential analysis paralysis. I can see this game being a loooonnnnnnggg one at 4p. At 1p its more than fine – but if I had to use one word to sum up this game it would be TENSE. This is not a ‘fun’ game. It is an absolutely chewy, challenging and at times frustrating puzzle. If that isn’t your thing then look away.

If like me it is, then welcome onboard fellow Plague Fighters.

Anything I don’t particularly like?:

Not a huge amount of grumble from me on this one. If I was really trying to find fault then perhaps the end of round housekeeping is a little more fiddly than I would like. Also, the way you use your individual player boards to trigger rescued townspeople actions is a little convoluted and I think could have been slightly streamlined. Finally, while almost every element of the game can be randomised each time I somehow find myself largely playing the same way every time. I suspect that last point is more me being a creature of habit than a fault of the game - and so far my apathy towards asymmetrical boards has stopped me exploring this potential variability in detail.

Solo Headlines:

I mentioned in a previous review of Praga Caput Regni that it was the game that turned my head away from being fixated on point scoring automa and more towards Beat your Own Score and this is another game from the same co-designer which lends itself very well to BYOS in my humble opinion. Simply flip a tile (or printable card if you prefer) which provides basic competition for spaces on the main board as well as for cabin / wagon / workshops tiles. ‘Opponent’ moves should take about five seconds tops.

What I like about both Praga and Messina 1347 is that you have a target score to beat (in this case 130) and in both games it genuinely feels quite a challenge and at the time of writing a challenge for Messina 1347 that I have only managed a solitary time in my first ten plays. Now some players might indeed end up grokking the game (or just be better than me!) and find themselves consistently able to score higher than the target score. But I think for most mere mortals the target score is really well set and provides a consistent challenge and one that more often than not I find myself falling short of. This adds to the desire to replay the game again and again – wanting to see if I can hit that target. It becomes quite addictive!

A full solo game plays in 60 minutes or under and having also played a few times at 2p, the solo mode does a really excellent job of replicating exactly what another player would do to ‘interfere’ with your own game. I’ve been frustrated recently by games (Bitoku springs to mind) that are advertised as being for 1-4 players but ultimately are multiplayer games that really should have remained so – with their overly complex solo modes devised to technically make the game playable at 1p count but in reality so complex to play solo that there is little enjoyment to be had. What I see from Messina 1347 (and previously, Praga) is a game that is just as playable solo as it is multiplayer and doesn’t have any alternative complex solo rulesets as a result. This leaves me feeling like I have played a game and not just mimicked what a game could feel like. That difference is crucial to me as a solo player and Messina is excellently designed and definitely suited to the solo experience.

At a Glance:

+ The theme and mechanics of the game work really well together.

+ Worker placement twist makes this a good spatial puzzle and not just a race for available spaces.

+ The clear distinction yet excellent intertwine between the worker placement and engine building sides of the game is very cleverly done.

+ There is almost a game within a game happening here – WHAT you do and WHEN you do it being two things you have to keep a watchful eye on.

- Takes a little while longer than usual for that ‘ahhhh, now I get it’ moment which might be too long for some players.

- This is a tense game where you are grinding and earning every last move and resource – some people will find the toil less enjoyable than others (like me) who relish the wicked challenges within.

- Maybe a little too much fiddle between rounds

Final score:

9 out of 10 (scoring slightly higher purely for just being so darn good solo)

Reviewed after 11 plays.