Architects of the West Kingdom Game Review

 Set in the west of the Carolingian Empire, Architects of the West Kingdom players take on the role of royal architects competing for favor and glory. Your workers gather resources, hire apprentices, and construct buildings, including the king's magnificent new cathedral. Throughout the game, the actions you take will affect your integrity; Do you remain honest and unassuming, working for the cathedral, paying your taxes and managing your debts more easily, or do you take advantage of the temptations found on the black market, easily accumulating scarce resources while destroying your reputation? In architects, the choice is yours.

 Architects of the West Kingdom is a worker placement game where players take turns sending one of their twenty identical workers to any of a dozen locations in the city. Not enough money? Send Aled—as I like to call them—to the Silversmith. Need a stone? Jacinth can run to the Quarry. You will use the collected materials to build landmarks and contribute to the construction of the Royal Cathedral, receiving any short- or long-term benefits associated with your work.

 Every time the player wants to build, he sends a worker to the Guild, where he will remain until the end of the game. If you build a landmark from your hand, you pay the appropriate resources and play the card in your play area, receiving any immediate bonus it might give. If you contribute to a cathedral, you pay the cost associated with the next tier of the cathedral track and move your token up the row. Each level is worth an increasing number of points and has a limited number of seats available. Players cannot work on a cathedral if the next tier is completely full and there is only room for one on the last tier. Competition for those 20 points can be fierce.

CH-CH-CH-CH-CH-CHANGE. PART 1

 This is all standard issue with worker placement games, but Architects differ in a few ways. Worker placement often limits each field to one meep and uses a circular structure where players remove their workers from the board every few turns. In Architects, you can't block other players in most locations, and workers stay in place until they're forcibly removed. This is to your advantage because more of your workers in one location means more benefits for you. If you send Morgan to join Jacinth in the Quarry, you get two stones this turn.

 Whether you need your own workers or someone else has more of a presence in one location than you'd like, you can use the Town Center to bring people together. Your own employees are returned to your stocks, ready to go back to work, while you hold your rivals' subordinates captive. The world of architects is unprincipled, and you can make all sorts of slanderous accusations about the business practices of your opponents. When you turn them in to the local garrison a few turns later, they'll be arrested on charges of impropriety, and you'll receive a reward of one coin per head. If your own employees are accused of wrongdoing, you can get them fired, no questions asked.

FRIENDS, FRIENDS, FRIENDS, I DEFINITELY HAVE FRIENDS

 Disciples are the common thread that runs through all three Western Kingdom games. At the Workshop, you can hire one of the eight Apprentice Cards available, which grant you permanent abilities and allow you to build certain types of landmarks. These abilities can vary widely, covering everything from material bonuses to additional actions only available to you. Each student can offer their own path to victory, and the game shines in finding combinations that go well together. The apprentice deck that comes with the game is generous - not to mention if you get all the mini-expansions like I did - and helps add a lot of variety to later games.

 A quick note on this: The Age of Artisans expansion introduces a training step where players, in reverse turn order, obtain one of the available apprentices from the workshop before starting the game. Designer Shem Phillips said in an interview that he regrets not including this rule in the base game, and even though I don't have Artisans, I use this option.

WANT TO BUY A SUNCLOCK?

 The Black Market, a collection of three spaces in the lower left square of the board, offers easy access to a selection of other expensive actions and rare goods. Instead of paying four coins to hire an apprentice and two of them going to taxes, why not pay two coins under the table and hire any apprentice you want? Why waste two turns sending workers down the mine to get one lousy piece of gold "the fair way", whatever that means, when you can pay three coins to rip out two bars now, and we'll throw in some wood and rocks while you're here ?

 Black Market workers remain there until all three slots are filled, triggering a Black Market reset. All Black Market workers are rounded up and sent to the Garrison, and any player with three or more workers in prison loses power. Also, the player with the most workers in the prison takes a debt, which subtracts two points if not paid at the end of the game, but rewards one honesty if paid. The Black Market items have been replaced with new offerings and three locations are available again.

 Keep in mind that the goods here are not just bargains. To the left of the field is the Virtue track, which tracks your reputation throughout the game. Working on the cathedral increases your honesty, while using items offered on the black market lowers it. There is a balance here. The black market is the easiest place to get the rare materials you need to work on the cathedral, but you can't shop there if your reputation is too high, which means it will take longer to progress through the cathedral than if you were a bit bad. On the other hand, if your reputation is too low, you cannot work on the cathedral, the best way to increase your reputation. Do too much of either and the other slips out of reach. The Track of Virtue encourages players to play a variety of strategies throughout the game, but more than that, it gives Architects of the Western Kingdom a great and immersive sense of narrative.

CHANGES PART 2

 The net effect of all this preparation is a staffing game where you have to pay a little more attention to what everyone else is doing. Not only are you trying to figure out when to build, when it's safe to go black market, or when you should do everything you can to break your workers out of prison, but you also have to keep track of what apprentices your opponents have recruited and the action spaces that will benefit them as a result. Repeatedly going out of your way to disrupt others won't win the architect game, but doing it enough to keep your opponents from running away will.

MISCELLANEOUS

 The choice to make spaces both disposable and reusable is exciting. This eliminates two problems associated with the placement of workers. Player interaction in this genre usually boils down to blocking your opponents or having to think on your feet as a result of losing the space you need. The most unrelenting worker placement games—I'm referring to Russian Railways in particular—offer such a shortage of seats that every move is a knife to someone's heart. Handier titles like Viticulture give you a special worker that can't be blocked, or an action space that lets you copy anywhere else on the board. In these games, much of the tension comes from figuring out when to use that safety net.

 Architects find surface tension when you want to build, when you want to reset the Black Market, and when you have to stop one of your opponents from getting too many workers in a certain location. The main tension lies in the choreography of your movements on the paths of the Cathedral and Virtue.

CONCLUSIONS

 Accessible yet with subtle challenges that will reward more experienced players, interactive without any penalties or over-confrontation, and richly reminiscent of the world through both its art and mechanics, Architects of the West Kingdom is a stunning game. That's a huge amount of content for such a small box, and it's a great choice for introducing people who are new to board games to the medium-difficulty process.

 I must note that Architects includes a very good solo mode that manages to convey a lot of the feeling of playing against a human opponent. The bot can also be used to add a third opponent to a two-player game, which I highly recommend.

 In the end, the Western Kingdom series is a great entry-level game if you want to transition people to more difficult games. The iconography in Architects carries over to Paladins of the Western Kingdom and Viscounts of the Western Kingdom, two much harder—and, I would argue, much better—games. Having familiar characters as a guide can make it a lot easier for more people who are used to light games to dig in.

USEFUL LINKS

Architects of the West Kingdom on the BGG portal

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/236457/architects-west-kingdom

Architects of the West Kingdom on the Game Theory portal

https://www.tg.in.ua/boardgames/74/architects-west-kingdom

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Architects of the West Kingdom (ukr)

DESCRIPTION OF THE BOARD GAME ARCHITECTS OF THE WESTERN KINGDOM The Vikings of the North Sea once made a fuss in Europe, causing severe headaches to the Carolingian Empire until its collapse. But there were quiet days in the empire, when life was in full swing, and court architects held competitions every day, erecting new buildings and decorating the kingdom with amazing sights. However, sometimes one talent and capable apprentices was not enough. To gain the King's mercy, the architects a..