Page 31 - Spielbox_2_2020

pay money or goods; others
that your skill level in one of the three areas is at or above a certain level. It is with the second of these that the tempo- rary boosts provided by your paladin can be vital.
The six locations on the left-hand half of your board are the cheaper ones, each only needing one or two workers. One gives you money, another gives you goods,
and a third enables you to exchange an ordinary worker for a criminal. Criminals can be used as any colour worker, and so their usefulness is obvi- ous. They also often give you money. However, rather like
the black market in the first game of this series, they carry a risk. With each criminal comes a “suspicion card” and at several times during the game there will be an “Inquisition”, at which point the player or players with the most such cards are given a penalty card. These will cost you victory points at the end of the game, unless you can find a way to get rid of them before then.
The other two important locations in the left-hand half are “recruit” and “develop”. At the start of the round, six Townsfolk cards are placed on the cen- tral board. Each shows two benefits: an immediate, once-only one, and a per-
manent one. If
you use one worker and pay the required amount of money, you get the first of these; if you use two workers, you keep the card and get the second. These benefits are good, particularly if you have several of the permanent ones and they work together, but the “recruit” action isn’t as important as the “develop” one, which you need to be doing early and often.
I Workshops quickly
pay for themselves
What development does is enable you
to place a workshop at one of the loca- tions in the right-hand half of your board. All of these are demanding the placement of three workers when the game starts. The placement of workshops enables you to reduce this demand to two, or even one. It is a shortage of workers that stops you doing all the things you’d like to do in this game. Workshops are quite expensive, but they quickly pay for them- selves by enabling you to do more things in each round. Again, this reminds one of Orléans, where the cogs work in a similar way.
Three of the actions from the right-hand half of your board involve moving a piece
from the row in which it started the game to somewhere else, either on the central board or your own player one. Doing this gives you a reward
and also increases your skill level in either the faith or influence catego- ries. This is all quite abstract, but the other three bring us back to the
story. These are building fortifica-
tions (a row of cards that you place along the top of your board) and
dealing with the invaders.
The invaders work in a simi- lar fashion to the townsfolk, in that the round will begin with
a row of six cards on the central
board. They are also similar in
that each card can be dealt with
in one of two ways and that the
further they are along the row,
the harder they are to acquire/
defeat. If you take the “attack”
action, the card is discarded, and
you get an increase in influence
and a once-only reward. If you opt
for the alternative action of “convert”, the increase is in strength, you add the card to your board and gain a permanent ben- efit. That might make conversion sound the better, but adding these cards to your board costs increasing amounts of money, which balances out the two choices.
I bought Paladins because both of my groups enjoyed Architects, and I was half hoping for another game of similar playing time and weight. It’s not that. Architects is rated as “medium” on the BoardGameGeek 5-point scale of light to heavy, and
ime of just over the hour. Paladins takes two
hours plus to play
i
it
t h
ha
as
s a
a p
pl
la
ay
yi
in
ng
g t
ti
29
spielbox