They score points for the cathedral progress, virtue track, marble and lose points for their Unpaid Debts and for every two workers still in prison.

In the non-solo game, when you run out of workers, you have to spend your action to reclaim just one. I must say that I don’t fully understand the ‘gaming the system’ strategy you are suggesting here, perhaps because I have tried to go down this road a couple of times with little success. The aim of Architects of the West Kingdom is to be the player with the most Victory Points (VP) at the game’s end. Do you want to go to the Profiteer to pocket the quick Influence, and then capture them back before the Black Market Reset to earn MORE Influence? Continued monopolisation of spaces comes with its own pitfalls, leading into the second key concept: The ability to capture workers from these spaces.

Suddenly I wasn’t working on a strategy anymore, I was trying to jail as many opposing workers as I could before triggering a Black Market reset, which in turn triggers a check to see who has the most workers in jail and punishes you accordingly – Debts, which the opponent couldn’t all pay off, resulting in massive penalties. In this way, players can control their opponent’s supply of workers, forcing them either to pay to get their workers back, or limit their options significantly until you hand them over at the Guardhouse. In Architects of the West Kingdom: Works of Wonder, builders from far and wide have travelled to partake in the King’s latest endeavour -. The game features the same fantastic art from The Mico and another twist on the worker placement genre.

Each Wonder can be built by spending Influence, Silver, and one of the five resources associated with the Wonder (clay, wood, stone, gold, and marble) you are building.It’s very easy to learn the new actions and features, and if you don’t feel confident using them, you can still compete just using the base game actions. With the same artist onboard (Mihajlo Dimitrievski), the same emphasis on gathering and assigning resources and even the same kind of board design, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was some kind of glorified expansion to Raiders, a semi-sequel of sorts. The insert is perfectly serviceable, and the box is perfectly adequate, even for adding extras from the Kickstarter. Aside from the already high variety of apprentice and building cards that come up, the bot deck is always going to present new challenges for you.

It takes two of my actions to send AI workers to jail and 2 or 3 actions for me to trigger a reset (which then can generate a single -2 VP debt for the AI), but only one AI action to freely release them either from jail or from my holding pen (or maybe even pay off their debt), and there are a good number of those jail cards in the starting AI deck. It doesn’t take long to realise, however, that unlike in other worker-placement games, you don’t pick your workers back up. I’m with Alan on this… Calculating when to make your move with regards to capturing your own and other players ‘ meeples, sending those to prison for money and then triggering a Black Market Reset is part and parcel of the fun here… That said, with higher player numbers the building count can go up very quickly, meaning it feels like the game has stopped too soon and the interplay of prison interaction never really gets a chance to do more than scratch a surface itch.I do appreciate that this game is a nice, lightweight worker placement game, with a twist and I love that twist. Pretty soon though, things start to snowball, and you can start to tell how the other players intend to set out their stall. It’s an easy way to get a lot of points, but your Virtue will suffer and you’ll find yourself barred from working on the Cathedral. The ability to capture workers adds depth to the game as does the Virtue balancing act (both for VP at the end of the game as well as the ability to do certain actions in-game).