Dave Reviews: The Third Century

Century: A New World

If I'm going to review the third Century, it might be more interesting to cover the decline of the Roman Empire during that period. Over twenty emperors served in the role in a fifty year span after the death of Alexander Severus. Isn't that cool? Or, you know, historically interesting?

But you're probably not here for that.

Century: A New World is the last game in the Century trilogy. Like Spice Road and Eastern Wonders, it features cube trading as its core mechanic but plays very differently to the others outside of that. It also combines with the other games to make yet more playable games, but that falls outside this review.

In fact, this review will assume a familiarity with at least one of the other Century games on the part of the reader, probably Spice Road. This is because the design of the games becomes more complicated as you go along, and if someone were to be newly introduced to the series, they should absolutely be directed towards Spice Road first. Although the trading options are more diverse, all you need to be concerned with is whether you're trading for the right spices. Eastern Wonders and, now, A New World add more considerations into the mix.

This version of Century has the simplest trades of the three. You can still make multiple trades on a turn if you have the goods for it (e.g. one green for two red can become four green for eight red if you have the green cubes), but the vast majority of trades work in small numbers and without bringing a variety of cubes into the mix. The point cards are also highly simplified, always needing three cubes in some variety to take them.

You have a certain number of villagers (six or seven to start, maxes at twelve), and each trade requires moving a certain number of villagers into a trade slot. If someone else is in a spot you want, you can bump them out by putting in one more villager than they have. This allows you to grab a trade spot you really need, but since the only way to normally get your villagers back is to skip a turn and rest, it's very helpful to the opponent you're bumping out. When you want to score a card, you also need to use however many villagers the slot that card is in requires. This aspect of trade is also quite easy to deal with.

The complications come from the extras attached to the scoring cards. Each one has a bonus ability and a symbol. The bonus ability can let you use one less villager to trade in areas with the attached icon, take an extra cube of a certain type when trading in areas with the attached icon, gain extra villagers, and so on. The symbols are connected to bonus tokens you can optionally from the scoring card slots. These usually require a certain symbol or pair of symbols, and you earn bonus points from each of those you have on your scoring cards at the end of the game. So, when scoring, you're not just looking for points; you're also looking for bonuses that will be especially effective in helping you as the game progresses.

Optimally, players will be able to use similar bonuses to help themselves in a similarly effective way. That is, if you have two bonuses that let you spend one less villager, and I have two bonuses that let me spend one less villager in different locations, we should be about equally able to win as long as we play to these strengths we've earned during the game.

However, it suffers from an imbalance issue. Not a major one, but one that, no matter how long I spend looking it over, I can't figure out their logic. They attached the icons to certain cube colors for the aesthetics—baskets, leaves, and corn are connected to yellow and green, whereas meat, bones, and leather are red and brown—and, in line with the value of those cube combinations, the villagers required for most of the yellow/green nodes max out at two, while the red/brown ones max at three. Thematic, right?

What ends up happening, though, is that if one person gets a -1 villager bonus to the basket spaces, and someone else gets a -1 villager bonus to the bone spaces, the latter player has an advantage. The reason is that while that player will go through their villagers faster (the bone nodes cost two), when they rest, the bone nodes re-open and they can again take advantage of their bonus. The 1-cost basket nodes, on the other hand, remain full, and that player has more turns where their bonus avails them nothing. You also have to unlock one more basket node than bone node for them all to be available.

On top of all that, if the player with the bone bonus receives a second one, now three spaces with a three-villager base cost are only one villager each for him, which is incredibly powerful. The basket bonus player, on the other hand, only benefits from a second -1 bonus in one node, because most of them cost two and you have to use a minimum of one villager.

Maybe this works out better than I realize when everyone is experienced at the game. Maybe it works... in some way I just don't understand. Emerson Matsuuchi did well enough with Spice Road and Eastern Wonders that he deserves some benefit of the doubt, that there's strong logic behind these choices and it wasn't a pure experiment or a design he finalized under deadline pressure.

And it's not like the game is bad; you'll still spend time agonizing over making the right trades, parsing out your moves for maximum effectiveness, and most games will still be fairly close by the end. If you're a big fan of Spice Road and Eastern Wonders, I'm sure you'll enjoy this. It's worth picking up both as a continuation of the series and for the additional combo games you can create with the other games. But if somebody is kind of meh about the first two, this isn't the game that's likely to change their minds.

Score: Seven cubes (three red, two green, two brown) out of ten cargo slots.