Sorcerer City: Rapid Review
Information:
Mechanics: Real-Time, Tile Building, Tile Placement
Player Age: 14+ Player Count: 1 - 6 PlayersTime to Play: 45 - 60 Minutes
Game Designer: Scott Capulto
Player Age: 14+
Game Designer: Scott Capulto
Year Published: 2020
BGG Weight: 2.25I have recently decided that I would try a new review format that focuses more on my thoughts than how the game runs. This new format is called a R.A.P.I.D. review and the categories are Rundown, Alteration, Production, Interaction and Determination.
Rundown:
Each year sorcerer city is built, reset and re-built. You and your fellow players are playing as rival architects and will try to gain the most prestige over the course of five years. This occurs by players laying tiles in real time to score in areas of influence, gold, prestige and magic. After each year players will be able to transfer all of their magic to one other resource and spend gold to add more advanced/specific tiles into their deck.
Alteration:
After each round a monster tile will be added to each players deck. This creates a unique puzzle that players will have to solve when the tile appears in the city building phase. These tiles can range from skeletons that blocks placement to monsters that destroy/discard tiles. Each game, 4 monsters will be used out of 14. This helps to keep the games unique every time as you will often have to alter your strategy to mitigate the damage that the monsters will cause.
There is also a market of tiles filled with over 100 options that helps players decide on different strategy paths, gain multiple tiles, focus on certain ways of scoring or add certain colours to be scored.
Production:
In typical druid city fashion the production value is on point. Since this is a the deluxe edition, I have the metal coins which are the best I have seen as they connect together. The game box is very big but it can still fit on your shelf easily as the insert has all components sitting perfectly no matter how you store the game. The insert also has detailed spaces for each tile group (shown on the back of each tile) for when packing up, keeping the next set up easy.
Interaction:
The main interaction of players comes from the influence track. The first place player on the track will be able to gain prestige points and a bonus based on the year. These points begin low at 6 points but by the end of the game will be a whopping 25 points. The influence bonus (shown on a card) will be awarded to first place. Second place gets to choose the points or the bonus, while third place receives the leftover option. The influence rewards are great and can give you tiles for free or let you buy more tiles. But they can also kill monsters in your deck or kill other player's monsters and you will gain gold or prestige.
Deciding to go for influence in the tile laying phase of every year can leave the players sacrificing gold to buy new cards or prestige points. So, the player's will have to decide if the influence is worth it and just how much they will need to gain first place. This can be stressful to achieve as you are already laying tiles in real time. To alleviate this, there is the magic resource. Players can choose to change all of their magic into one of the other three resources.
Determination:
I would highly recommend Sorcerer City if you are looking for a frantic real time game that gets more challenging as the game continues. As you buy more tiles and monsters are added it becomes hard to play within the time limit and even harder to play them in a way that will give you the most resources possible. This has combined tile laying with the decisions of deck building and pacing of a real time game in such an engaging way that it is staying in my collection and has earned a go-to golden game seal.
Click...feed the addiction:
Druid City Games
Sorcerer City on BGG
Expand Your Game Facebook page
Expand Your Game Instagram
Comments
Post a Comment