Renegade Game Studios Renegade Game Studio | Architects of the West Kingdom | Board Game | Ages 12+ | 1 to 5 Players | 60 to 80 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

This deluxe Collector's Box is designed to fit Architects of the West Kingdom, Works of Wonder, and all additional content, such as promos, metal coins, and sleeved cards. The excellent solo game from the base game also makes the transition to Age of Artisans really easily too. In Architects of the West Kingdom, visit the Town Centre and pay 1x silver (to Tax) to capture opponents’ workers!

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. Do you cash in captured workers or grab some more and seek to put them in prison just before the black market is resolved? The other really nice addition that Age of Artisans brings, is a new player colour – orange – and along with it, the ability to play up to six-player games. This leaves you with a choice: rise above such petty competition and remain virtuous, or resort to thievery and hit the black market like it’s the Next Boxing Day sale. First, the concept of getting more at a spot as you have more workers there is a nice change from the norm.Also, we could either find some two player variants on the internet or turn to a solo game if we don’t have anyone to play with. What I usually notice is that I have a certain play style that pops up if I’m not being nudged in certain directions. You get a certain way into the process and then realise ‘Oh yes, and there’s a lot of the game hidden in the cards and it’s written in a way that will be utterly unreadable to all of you. You can never truly know how much of anything you’ll need until the game is reaching its conclusion and so why not insure yourself against scarcity? A third option: you can pay 5x silver (2x of these to Tax) to retrieve your workers trapped on a Player Board.

Semiotics, as a subdiscipline of board game design, is very badly under-emphasised and I appreciate that Shem Phillips is violently bucking that trend. The winner is the player who acquires the most victory points from a combination of buildings, Cathedral progress, their position on the Virtue track, any unpaid debts, and any game-end VP conditions among their buildings. Shem Phillips and Garphill Games are rapidly becoming one of the most consistent publishers of board games. There’s a multitude of ways to get hold of them, so you can approach each game—and each unfolding situation within—in a ton of different ways. If you believe board game accessibility is important and can support our Patreon you'd be helping make sure the site can continue with this valuable work.Trying to determine the best place for your workers as well as when to capture workers is now more complicated. I also discovered videogames in the meantime, but there’s something about the tactile feel of cardboard and cards! Set roughly 50 years before Paladins, Architects of the West Kingdom puts you in the role of a royal architect. It’s for this reason that I think Architects of the West Kingdom will now be my go-to worker-placement introduction game.

Town Centre – This is a weird location where you may spend 1 coin per worker you have in the Town Centre to then collect all the workers of one color from a single board location mentioned thus far. Architects of the West Kingdom is a very good game but I confess my heart sank when I first opened the box. The spots in the Guildhall are not filled quickly at the start of the game as players are working to collect resources and build an engine of sorts to maximize their actions.Well, to craft both new options, you need to stack a worker on top of a worker that is already in the guildhall, as well as pay 5 Silver for the adornment. Do you spend a turn capturing your Artisan back or leave it on the board knowing your opponent may do the same? Not to mention that in pursuing this strategy I’m not actually making too much progress towards my own building goals, and without the right assistant to mitigate black market virtue loss, you can’t be hitting that black market over and over like a drum lest you accumulate a bunch of your own debts. If any of these coins are red on the board, those are tax, and those coins are placed in the Tax Stand. Plus, they can just better their lives at the end of the game and get out of the negative points and maybe even into the positives.

It may not have a lot of fresh ideas, but the biggest fresh idea it does have is like a welcome waft of cool air flowing through a dusty cave.It also has a couple of other unique abilities to protect it from random chance, namely being able to visit the Black Market or work on the Cathedral regardless of its current Virtue. Architects of the West Kingdom is a game that is built around a system that pathologizes risk-taking to a degree I’m not sure I’ve ever seen in a game before.