Thursday, January 31, 2019

Dave Reviews: The Glorious City of Chamber Pots

Bruges

The thing about games set in places like fifteenth-century Belgium is that they glorify these beacons of the medieval era without acknowledging all the fucked up places that people had to poop.


Bruges is a decently heavy strategy game based on two of the most random pieces of game design—dice and cards. At a glance, it's like, "Hey, game! Why you do this? This no good!" But it works out.

Let me explain.

The thing to understand about Bruges is that its strategy is not nearly as much of the plan-ahead variety as it is of the react-to-circumstances variety. You start each round with five cards, drawing (usually) four and having one left over from the previous round. You don't know what the cards are, but you do know their color from the back. There are five colors and five dice (one of each color). Each card has a person on it, but the people are frequently irrelevant. Not only is this OK, it's actually quite a good thing—since most of the cards you draw will only be used for their color, you can wait until you find people you really need to fill the houses you build, which dramatically lessons how luck of the draw affects you.

Furthermore, a big chunk of the strategy is dependent on having sufficient cash, which itself depends on the dice. Although some cards earn you money (and if you can get a good money-making engine going, it's often worth the effort), quite frequently you'll discard a card for some coins. The money you receive depends on the number on the die. There's more luck involved here—dice are rolled after cards are drawn, so you don't know what will be worth the most—but even so, there are enough action options that you can generally wait until cards are worth the most (five or six coins each) before using them for cash. Get some workers, build some canals with the cash you already have, build some houses for the new folk... if you have to take one or two coins with a card, it's rare that bad luck truly left you with no other option. It's much more common for it to happen to someone who takes a risk that doesn't pan out.

Mostly the complexity of Bruges revolves around how to get the points you need to win. Spend your money on reputation? If there are some cheap hits early, it's a good plan, but you might price yourself into getting the higher levels of rep when you need the money for other things. Hire high-VP people? That's straight cash, homie. Build canals? That's a lot of cash too. Build majorities? Not so hard early if you focus it, since you only need to have the majority in people, canal sections built, or reputation points once during the game. But if you have to catch up, or if you're trying to stay ahead to deny one or more opponents a chance at those points, it can get pricey. Given how clear most of the point options are to your opponents, it's often finding synergy among the point bonuses some people hand out that can be the difference, which means getting those synergistic hires and then finding more people who work with them. There are a lot of options, but that goes further still towards reducing the luck factor.

Bruges is out of print right now, but if you get a chance to play it—or better yet, find it cheap at a garage or estate sale—go for it. Very much worth the time for the hour-long strategy game fan,

Score: Thirty-one of the thirty-six points that would have let me win my very first game.

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