Viceroy game review

We make game sessions with friends on a semi-regular basis. Our main base is located in a country house in Bauska, and this time the session was not attended by the fans of the more serious games. That's why moderate "difficulty" and party games like Ticket to ride , Mysterium and Dixit were respected. The latest Brain Games store purchase, Viceroy, was also placed on the table. Then in this blog I will share the first impressions of the game.

Components:

The first impression of the game is good, the components have beautiful drawings, easy to understand iconography, but the problems are in the size of the icons. They were too small for my taste, but to be fair, the game's creators solve this problem by using cardboard tokens that symbolize the goodies obtained from the cards. Also, the cards are obscenely thin, but that's also understandable given the game's friendly price.

Subject:

Quick description, no topic. Even after I told you when teaching the rules that the game takes place after a civil war, which has caused political upheaval in the country, and the players are fighting among themselves to attract allies to a new political power. No matter how hard I tried to instill a theme, in the end all my friends saw was how many colored tokens they would get if they built a certain card.

Mechanics:

The game is more strategic than tactical, from the beginning you have to understand what the main strategy will be and aim for it. Right now, I see about three or four possible strategies, all of which seem pretty acceptable to win. The main mechanic is "Set collection", which means sticking to a strategy and seeing which cards will interact better.

The game has 12 rounds, each of which is divided into two parts - auction and card construction. Card construction - nothing special, but the auction gives a good dose of adrenaline, because there is no outbidding, but players simply choose one of the four colored tokens (gems) and bid on one of the four cards, each with a corresponding gem. If you are the only one who participated in the auction with a yellow stone, very good, but if Karl and Ilse both have a blue stone, then no one will get the card. And so three times in a round. This auction forces players to follow the game and gives a kind of adrenaline because there are not many gem tokens and you can never be sure that someone will bid the same as you.

In general, the game is exciting, it definitely has a lot of multiplayer, but to fully enjoy it, it is recommended to play with the full number of players (fourth), because then the auction mechanics will work best. Overall, despite the component quality and lack of theme, this is a decent choice. Rating 7 out of 10. Glad I got to try it with my friends, but the big winner was Leo, who was the self-proclaimed grand king of the evening.