7 Wonders
Designed by: Antoine Bauza
Published by: Repos Production
Players: 2-7
7 Wonders is a civilization-building card game where players compete to build the most impressive city across three phases ('ages') of drafting. By constructing buildings, earning money, fighting wars and gradually assembling your city's wonder of the world, you earn victory points. The player with the highest score at the end of the third age is the winner.
The sequence of play is simultaneous and relatively straightforward. Starting with a hand of 7 cards at the start of each age, every player will choose a card to play from their hand, then pass the rest to the next player. Then they choose another card from the 6 they just received from the previous player, and pass them on again. This continues until there are only two cards remaining, one of which is played and the final one discarded. This "pick one, pass it on" style of play is very easy to explain and more importantly, very consistent. While there is a lot of iconography to take in and a fair bit of strategy to absorb, the individual turn will never be more than "pick one card", which cuts down on the confusion. And minimising confusion will be important, this is one of those games where there's just a lot to teach upfront. Having chosen a card you will either build it (add it to your tableau), discard it for 3 coins, or use it to construct a stage of your wonder. Speaking of wonders, let's start with a look at the wonder board.
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| The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, The Colossus of Rhodes and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon |
Each player receives one of these boards, depicting one of the titular wonders. The wonder boards vary in abilities and are generally assigned randomly, but all have some things in common. At the top left of the board is shown a resource. Each city produces one resource type on it's own, and you will add to this over the course of the game with other resource cards. Most cards will have a cost in resources that you must be able to meet in order to build that card. The resources your city produces are not consumed or stockpiled, you simply have all of the displayed resources available in a given turn. You are also able to purchase resources from your neighbouring players. They can't refuse you, but it also doesn't prevent them from using that resource. Along the bottom of the wonder board are (usually) three 'stages'. Each turn, instead of building the card you choose, you can instead slide it face down under your wonder board and use it to construct a stage of your wonder - if you can meet the resource cost for that stage. Stages must be built left to right, but otherwise you can build them (or not) at any point. The 'A' side of the wonder boards are the basic introductory setups, and generally each wonder will provide 3 victory points for completing the first stage, some kind of unique bonus for the second stage, and a further 7 victory points for completing the final stage. The 'B' sides are a little more complicated and varied, having more or less stages, different bonus types and adjusted victory point totals. The 'A' sides are recommended initially, but once you've got a game or two under your belt you'll start randomising the side as well as the wonders themselves.
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| That symbol means "go through the discard pile and build one card without paying it's cost". Very clear, obviously. |
So the wonder board represents the heart of your civilization and forms the center of your tableau. The cards are cleverly designed to stack in groups allowing the icons and card names to remain visible while grouping things together neatly. It's important to do this even if some players might have a natural urge to stack things directly on top of one another or just have a mess of cards in front of them. As we'll see it is important to be able to see at a glance what cards and icons your neighbours have, as while there is no direct interaction, your neighbours will be heavily influencing your strategy. You also cannot build the same card twice, so you'll want to be able to see what you've already built to make sure you don't accidentally double up. I've introduced a bunch of different people to 7 Wonders and it is always worth doing this correctly from the word go, even if it takes some gentle reminding. It also means you'll need sufficient space to have the cards laid out - make sure you've got a big enough table if you've got a lot of players!
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| A board begins to develop |
Each turn you'll select a card which you will usually build. You always have the option to discard a card for 3 coins if you can't afford or don't want to build a card, but every turn a card must be used in some way. The cards are grouped by colours into various types. Brown and grey cards are resources, raw and manufactured respectively. These add to the resources you produce every turn and will allow you to meet the costs of other cards you will want to build. Resources appear only in the first two ages, so plan accordingly. Blue cards are 'civilian' buildings which just provide straight victory points. Yellow cards are commercial cards, and usually relate to money or purchasing resources. Red cards are military and will give you a number of military points equal to the shield icons shown. Green cards are scientific buildings, which score you points based on how many of them you end up with. And purple guild cards appear only in age 3, and award victory points based on the various ways you or your neighbours cities have developed. A subset of these is randomly included each game, so the scoring possibilities change from game to game. Many cards are also part of 'chains' where they will be linked to cards in later ages. If you have the preceding card in the chain, you can build the next step for free if you get it. This is easily tracked as the names of chaining cards are labelled in the bottom right of each card (the cards it chains into) or next to the resource cost (the card it chains from).
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| A completed city |
After 6 cards are played and the last card discarded, players reconcile military with their neighbours. You compare the number of shields you own to the players on your left and right, the loser of each clash takes a -1VP token. The winner gets 1, 3 or 5 victory points depending on the age. So for example if you win against both your neighbours in age 3, you'll take home a whopping 10VP. Maybe there is something to be said for rampant militarism after all. After comparing militaries, the next hand of 7 cards is dealt out from the next age deck, and play resumes, now passing cards in the opposite direction. After the final round of building and military resolution, you count up the scores to see who's great people have best weathered the tests of time.
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| The cards nest together so you can still read icon and name for every card |
Scoring can get a little complicated. However there are plenty of smartphone apps available to assist. And to be honest, the official 7 Wonders companion app is a clear best of show here, and absolutely worth the ~$2ish price tag. In any case, you probably don't want to score by hand if you can avoid it. Particularly science. Speaking of science scoring, this is a good thing to address before the game begins. The way it works is that each green card (as well as some guilds, and wonder bonuses) depicts one of three science symbols. A wheel, a tablet or a set square. For each completed set of 3 you form, you score 7 victory points. You also get points for each symbol based on how many you have. Each card is worth as many points as the number of that symbol you have. So for example if you had 2 tablets, 3 wheels and 1 set square, you'd get 7 points for the one completed set, 4 points for the tablets, 9 for the wheels and 1 for the square for a total of 21 points in science. You can see why I'm telling you to just get the app. In any case, the exponential way this scoring takes place means that science becomes a more profitable strategy the deeper into it you get. And if one person is allowed to run away with all the science cards uncontested, their score will likely reflect that. It's easy to put a check on it but players just have to know that it's a thing to be aware of first.
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| Guilds score on city composition, the first scores 1VP for each blue card your neighbours have, the second 1 VP for each completed wonder stage both your neighbours and yourself have |
So 7 Wonders is pretty straightforward to play. Simultaneous turns means the game scales to any player count up to 7 (though the 2 player variant is a little bit messy, it still works ok) and it doesn't tend to drag on. After an initial learning game or two it's not unreasonable to finish in between 30 and 60 minutes. The first few games will probably go on longer, but you may actually feel like the ending is unexpectedly abrupt. A complaint some people will have - particularly those comparing it's drafting and building mechanisms to something like Magic - is that the game can feel like a big buildup to something. Which then doesn't happen. You spend a lot of time constructing a board but you do not then proceed to interact with it. It can lead to 7 Wonders feeling almost like half a game. I've made a big pretty city out of these cards and now I want to do something with them! Your tableau is more like a history of your decisions, the meat of the game is the agonizing choice each turn of which card to keep and which to pass.
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| Demonstrating building chains, Laboratory chains from Workshop (noted next to it's cost) and chains into Observatory and Siege Workshop in the next age |
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| Military victory and loss tokens |
And I do say "with the cards you're given", because that is ultimately what you're working with. Much of the game is going to come down to what you get passed and when. That sort of randomness helps keep the game fresh, but it does put a cap on how much strategy you can really expect from it. It's far more a tactical experience, picking out the best play right now or planning for a move or two in the future at best. Sure sometimes you'll want to lean a certain way, like when your wonder confers bonus military or a wild science symbol, but if you don't get passed the cards to support that strategy or can't build them at the time you see them, you're out of luck. The flipside of this of course is that you can safely pass cards when you know the player you pass them to won't be able to make use of it this turn. This sort of passive interaction can be very subtle and satisfying, but passive it is. There's no real direct inter-player interaction in 7 Wonders and some people don't like that. Even buying resources from someone doesn't actually involve the player you're buying from, as they have no input into the transaction. Definitely very euro.
Another issue that takes a bit of getting to grips with is the iconography. The cards and wonder boards are textless excepting their names, everything is communicated by symbols. This is great - once you've learned all the symbols. Apart from the easy stuff like resources, there are just a whole ton of symbols. Unique symbols. Symbols that are more or less standing in for a few lines of text each. They're intuitive enough that you'll remember them easily once you've established what they do, but not so intuitive that you could just hand them to someone and expect them to understand what they mean. There will be a lot of passing around of the reference booklet for your first few games. And you'll go through this every time you need to teach the game to new people. Investing in a few cheat sheet printouts wouldn't go astray - or the aforementioned companion app has an excellent on the fly reference of every symbol on every card. There is consistency at least, a card icon of a given colour is always referring to cards of that type, arrows left right and down are indicating your neighbours or yourself, wonder stages are always referred to the same way etc. It doesn't take many games before you'll understand it all. Given that the game is already so front loaded with rules explanations, I actually don't bother with a lot of this but make the list of symbols available in some format to the new players. Play some learning games and let them ask what a card does when they don't know. It's wildly impractical to try and explain all this iconography upfront.
All up, I love 7 Wonders. And judging by how often it gets requested, all kinds of other people love it too. It's light and quick enough that it works splendidly as somebody's first board game, but contains enough interesting decisions to make it engaging for more experienced types too. The art and components are beautiful, production values all over the game are just excellent. The cards are bright, colourful and clear. Despite the dense iconography, it results in being able to communicate everything essential about a player's board at a glance, and it is ultimately one of the more elegant design decisions here. It might take a bit of explaining initially but it will very quickly 'click' and become very intuitive for all concerned, so the new player/experience player divide isn't as pronounced. Introduce this to a few people and they'll be asking for it all the time, and you will be happy to play it. There are some gripes about the low interactivity but that won't be a dealbreaker for most, as it's still just fun to do what you're doing with your own city. 7 Wonders is a game I wouldn't hesitate to break out for any group, regular gamers or no. If you can put up with a little learning & teaching to get things under way, you'll have a lot of fun with this one.
And once you've played a few dozen times you'll probably want to add expansions! There are two expansions to date, Leaders and Cities, and you can play with either one alone or both. Lets jump straight into Leaders first!
7 Wonders: Leaders
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| 36 new leader cards. You won't see all of them every game, keeping up the variety of 7 Wonders |
As might be expected from a title like Leaders, the main addition to the game comes in the form of a deck of leaders that you will recruit to your civilisation. Each leader card represents a historical personality and provides some kind of bonus. From coins or resources to victory points and one off abilities, leaders are like extra buildings you pre-draft to give your strategy some direction. Pre-draft? Yes! There is now a new starting phase to the game before the first age. Each player is dealt 4 leader cards, and there is a mini-round of selecting a leader and passing the rest on, just like normal 7 Wonders play. The last leader is passed and kept by the player that receives it, rather than discarding. In this way each player will end up with 4 leader cards before the game proper begins.
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| Some leaders are relatively straightforward, symbol-wise |
Now we have our leaders, we just need to get them onto the board. At the very start of each age there is now a 'recruitment' phase. Leaders all cost coins, and you will now begin the game with an extra 3 to offset the cost of recruiting leaders. During recruitment, you will choose one of your drafted leaders, pay their cost in coins, and add them to your board just like you would any other card. If you can't or won't pay to recruit a leader, you can also discard a leader for 3 coins or use them to build your wonder (if you can afford the other costs) again the same as with any other card. Each recruitment phase you must recruit or use one leader card this way. As there are 3 recruitment phases to your 4 leaders, one will end the game still on the sidelines.
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| Others, not as much. |
So now that we're drafting certain abilities or symbols before the game even begins, a bit more broad strategy has been added to the game. Now we've got incentives to work towards a certain goal or bonuses to help along the way. This definitely helps add a bit more of a feeling of control, and mitigates being subjected to the whims of the cards you're being passed. There are some generic leaders that are just VP bonuses, I feel these are among the weakest (in terms of design I mean, not necessarily mechanically). They can be a fine choice (sometimes 'just VP' is what you want after all) but I prefer the ones that shape the way you play. It also adds another layer of strategy in how and when you recruit your leaders. The age 3 recruitment phase is the most crucial, as this is when I'll want to flip over my guy that's going to score me big points for all the red buildings I've been building up. Recruit him in age 1 and it's just asking to have my neighbours hate draft those cards away from me. Conversely the leaders that provide ongoing bonuses, like discounting construction costs or providing extra military you want to have out on the board as early as possible to squeeze the most benefit out of them. And of course sometimes you'll just have the strategy that doesn't quite come off, and the leader that was keying off that strategy will end up being your fourth, unused guy - but often the decision of who to recruit and who to leave at home is as painful as any choice made in-round.
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| Rome - The new leader-centric wonder board |
Leaders also adds a new wonder board to the mix in Rome. Appropriately enough, Rome is a very leader-focused board. So much so that Rome doesn't even produce a resource natively. One one side, it simply allows you to recruit your leaders (all of them) for free! Considering that some of the powerful leaders can run upwards of 5 coins each, this can be leveraged into some pretty good bonuses. The other side discounts your leaders by 2 coins each (and provides your neighbours with a 1 coin discount on theirs, which sorta makes up for stiffing them on having a resource to buy) and it's wonder stages let you draw and play extra leader cards. Rome is a great little wonder board that plays pretty uniquely, but it doesn't feel unbalanced compared to any of the previous lot, it just lends itself to a very focused strategy. If you're Rome, your plan is going to revolve around leaders period. Not like Rhodes for example where you can take or leave the military bonuses.
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| New guild cards also care about leaders |
The last new addition in Leaders are a handful of extra guild cards. These reference leader cards, such as the courtesan's guild which allows you to copy the effect of one of your neighbours recruited leaders. These new guilds are added to the pile of existing guilds that you randomly draw from when composing your age 3 deck, so you won't see them every game, but if for any reason you aren't running Leaders you'll need to take them back out as they don't work independent of the expansion. Nothing too revolutionary here but it's a nice bit of extra variety, and leader-related guilds would be conspicuous by their absence if they weren't included.
Overall Leaders adds more of what I like about 7 Wonders and specifically addresses one of the problems I had with the base game, namely a lack of mechanisms to enable long term strategy. With the new leader draft you can now start to piece together a plan before the first age is drawn, and you'll even be able to keep parts of it secret as you wait until the opportune moment to reveal Plato and your three age long plot to assemble multiples of every card type. The iconography issue rears its head again here, as almost every leader has a brand new icon so once again you'll be looking at the reference material a lot. Everything said about the base game's symbols applies again here, and it's also the main reason I don't teach the game with Leaders in the mix (Teaching the base game first without expansions is almost always the best idea anyway). I am quick to introduce it after the initial game though. It doesn't add a whole lot more length or setup to the game, and once you've got it you're not likely to go back to the base game. It's not a must buy right off the bat, 7 Wonders is plenty enjoyable without expansions, but I still give it a great recommendation. It adds more life to the game and makes it more interesting to play, a win all round.
7 Wonders: Cities
Cities is the second expansion released for 7 Wonders and it builds on the foundation laid by Leaders, also including new leader cards that interact with the new elements in Cities. And those elements up the interactivity and also the aggression. Like Leaders, Cities works to address some issues with the base game while providing more of the classic 7 Wonders formula. The new features added are debt, diplomacy and the black coloured city cards, as well as rules for team play and an 8th player (in the team format). Money also takes on a new significance as there will be a lot more demands on players coin across these new mechanics. Let's take a look at each.
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| Debt tokens - Indelible markers of financial failure |
Debt is the main aggressive mechanic in Cities, and also a new way to interact with other players. It is now possible to go below 0 coins, in which case a player takes a debt token for every coin they are unable to meet a given cost by. At the end of the game each debt token is worth -1VP, equivalent to a military loss. Debt can be incurred but cannot be repaid. Once you've taken a negative victory point, you're stuck with it no matter how much money you might come by later. Players will interact with debt primarily via the new coin attacks. The broken coin symbol on a card forces all other players to discard the amount of coins shown. For every coin they can't (or won't) pay, they must take a debt token. This features largely on the new city cards, and also on the new Petra wonder board. Discarding coins is a surprisingly hostile and interactive mechanic for a game like 7 Wonders which traditionally limits it's conflict to preemptively taking things other players want or obstructing their progression. The potential presence of debt-incurring city cards means that it's no longer safe to sit on an empty treasury until you need more coins to buy something. You could be inviting several victory points worth of penalties when you're surprised by a player with a debt incurring city card. It's also an ever present risk when actually spending coins, as your spending of coins on whatever card you are playing or resource you are buying is resolved before the attack card. So you may just have paid away the money you needed to stay out of debt.
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| New black "City" cards showing off the diplomacy and debt themes |
Diplomacy is another altogether new mechanic that puts a twist on the end of round military resolution. Players can now earn diplomacy tokens, either through the new city cards and leaders, or as wonder bonuses on the Byzantium board. Each diplomacy token you take causes you to skip the next military resolution phase, and return the token. This means that you are, for all intents, 'invisible' to the conflict phase. Your neighbours are now neighbouring with (and fighting with) each other. You take no military loss or victory tokens. This is however, non-optional. Each military phase if you have at least one diplomacy token, you must return it and skip the military resolution. Even if you were going to otherwise win. If there are only two players left in the military resolution, they fight each other only once. The use of diplomacy can be a nice bit of breathing room and a nasty surprise for the two players who are now unexpectedly fighting each other. And it provides another mechanism for avoiding the military arms race beyond "be prepared to eat -6 VP over the course of the game". Of course this strategy is more or less exclusive with trying to win from military victory points, as you won't want to skip phases in that case. This focusing or exclusion of options is a good thing though, providing some guidance and streamlining towards a cohesive strategy instead of just building what comes along, and I think more of that is a good thing for 7 Wonders.
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| We come in peace! |
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| An age 3 City military card provides a whopping five shields compared to a normal age 3 card's three. |
Then there are the regular additions, a handful more guilds and in this case, leader cards that are relevant to the new mechanics. Two new wonder boards, Petra and Byzantium, showcasing the money/debt and diplomacy focuses respectively. All good solid stuff, not particularly different to what we've seen before but dependably playable. The last interesting addition in Cities is rules for an 8th player and team play. As there are no additional basic cards (resources, science, military etc) provided, an 8th player in free for all still won't really work right despite the starting hand size of 8. The team rules allow players to work in pairs, each getting a wonder board as normal. Players on a team sit next to each other and are allowed to discuss what cards to play and look at each others hands as they plot what to build and what to pass. Each player will therefore have one neighbouring city as a partner and one neighbour as an opponent. You don't engage militarily with your teammate and can trade with them, however the following restrictions apply:
*No gifting of money or resources.
*Resources have to be paid for but can't be bought when not needed, nor may you buy a resource you could produce on your own.
*Resources can't be bought when you could build a building for free via a chain.
*Each player fights only one military conflict, with their adjacent opponent.
*Double victory points are awarded for these conflicts, however if one player has a diplomacy token, conflict is still resolved but for only the regular amount of victory points.
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| Sinister new leaders and guilds |
Other than that it's pretty much the same game. The team with the most victory points at the end wins. This could be a good way to introduce new players to the game (though it will mean dropping them into expansion territory with the Cities cards right off the bat), though keep in mind the team discussions are likely to add a bit to the clock. The addition of an 8th player is a nice thing, if not strictly necessary, as at 8 people a lot of groups are going to be looking into splitting up to play two different games, but it's nice to have the option.
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| Mask symbols copy science from your neighbours. Torture is scientific, apparently. |
All up Cities adds more good things to 7 Wonders even if it doesn't feel quite as game-changing as Leaders did. The coin attacks and debt elements add some needed interactivity, but are limited enough in their presence (and the fact that the city cards that are included are random) that they don't take over the game or fundamentally alter the nature of the conflict between players. Just interesting enough to add a new wrinkle. Diplomacy is also like this, providing an incremental rather than revolutionary change to the military resolution mechanic. When you've got a good thing going don't do too much to mess with it I guess! The extra guilds and leaders are more of the same, as are the new "Wonder centered on [expansion mechanic]" boards, but they are all well designed and playable and don't feel tacked on. "What you like, but more" is more or less the theme of Cities. It's a good package, however it's not overhauling the game any and you can do without it until you've gotten some mileage out of the base game. If you like 7 Wonders though, you'll probably end up with it eventually because it does keep the game fresh and adds it's own little touches to make it worthwhile. I'd suggest picking up Leaders first, but Cities is a fine expansion in its own right.
Torture is applied science.
ReplyDeleteApplied directly to the nipples.