Argent: The Consortium - Rapid Review
Information:
Mechanics: Programming, Variable Setup, Worker Placement, Player Powers
Player Age: 10+
Player Count: 2 - 5 Players
Time to Play: 60 - 150 Minutes
Game Designer: Trey Chambers
Game Artists: Jennifer Easley, Eunice Abigael Tiu
Publisher: Level 99 Games
Release Date: 2015
BGG Complexity: 3.79
Rundown:
The Chancellor of Argent University has just stood down. This is the opportunity you have been waiting for to rise the ranks to Chancellor yourself. All you have to do is win the favour of the majority of voters by having the most of their specific criteria. Each game will have 12 voters out of the possible 18. Only two of these voters are revealed at the start of the game. More of these voters will be revealed throughout the game by gaining marks. Ultimately, whoever has the majority of voters on their side will be the winner.
This is a worker placement and programming game with the potential for constant interaction between players. During the main phase of each round (the errands phase) players can perform actions such as cast spells, use supporters or vault cards, take a bell card or place workers. Every turn the players have one quick action and one standard action available. The quick actions are denoted with a lightning bolt symbol and come from the same potential as the standard actions.
Cast Spells:
Players will gain mana throughout the game and use this to cast spells. Spells have three different levels of increasingly powerful abilities that can be learned and gained through research (effect) and the use of wisdom/intelligence tokens. To use these spells the player will rotate the card 90° to signify that it is exhausted and will then resolve its effect. All spells will un-exhaust at the end of each round. Each research level of a spell will also help the player gain the favour of a department, where a voter may require the most sway with that department.
Play a supporter or vault card:
These cards have various abilities that will help the player throughout the game. Each supporter will have a one-time effect and will then go into the player's discard pile. There will be a mix of quick-action and standard-action supporters. Each supporter also aligns with a certain department that will help the player gain sway with that department if a voter requires it.
The vault cards can be consumables, one-time use and sometimes quick action cards and treasures that are continuous artefacts that can be used once as a standard action each round or resolve at the end of the game.
Take a bell card:
Once all the bell cards are taken during a round the errand phase will end and the resolution phase will begin. These bell cards will give the players immediate bonuses such as the first player marker for next round, coins, mana and influence. This gives control to the players to determine how fast they end the round, especially if other players will gain more benefits if the round continues.
Place a worker:
Five unique workers match the departments that are in the game. Five cards will denote which abilities each department's workers have. This could be protection against spells, being able to be placed as a quick action or being able to fireball another wizard out of the location you seek. The university is made up of several rooms that will each have several worker locations, often having the most beneficial action at the top and the lesser at the bottom. The top locations require the use a merit badge to resolve the location in the resolution phase. These merit badges can only be gained by reaching certain amounts of influence.
Unlike a normal worker placement game, the workers don't instantly resolve when placed in a location. Instead, this occurs in the resolution phase starting from the top left room to the bottom right room of the 3x3 grid. Each room is resolved from the top location down. This adds a programming element to the game as you have to plan for the resources you need further down and can collect these throughout this phase.
Alteration:
Level 99 Games does a great job of including a wide range of variability in their games, with no need for players to gain expansions straight away. Included in the game are an A and B side of all the characters, 15 university rooms, and the mage power cards. This creates an abundance of combinations that will keep every game feeling unique as the players can mix any combination of these A and B sides during setup.
Production:
The production of this game is great, with the mana and coin resources both made with plastic to create a more tangible feel. All the university rooms are made out of sturdy cardboard and miniatures are used for the workers. Since each worker isn't tied to a certain player there are also sets of coloured rubber rings to go around the base of the workers. This easily denotes whose worker is attached to each location.
Interaction:
As players are directly competing for the voter's attention, there is constant player interaction. This includes spells that will move your opponent's workers, or even directly hurt them and send them to the infirmary which gives that player a sympathy prize. On the A side of the red mage’s player card, they will directly send a mage to the infirmary and take their worker placement spot.
Until the resolution phase, players don't gain any of the benefits of their location so it is fair game what happens during the errand phase. There are plenty of spells and vault cards that can counteract these attacks, and the players can also directly control the length of the round by removing bell cards. For the locations in each university room, each action only has one worker spot allocated next to it. Some of the university rooms have an order of resolving for the action instead, but the player at the top spot of the board will still gain the first pick of whatever the room targets. Due to this restrictiveness of the board, there is also a shadow location on each worker location that will allow the player to place a mage there to also resolve that location in the resolution phase. Certain spells allows for the use of shadow locations.
Determination:
- A large amount of iconography and card types can be daunting to a new player.
- Plenty of replayability.
- Interesting combination of worker placement and programming.
- The voters give an interesting dynamic for the end of game as you have to spend resources to gain marks to properly aim for the right scoring.
Argent: The Consortium is a unique worker placement game that has constant cut-throat interaction as players are gunning for the Chancellor title. There are a couple of things that make this game unique that together makes the game stand out. The resolution phase is an interesting level of programming that I haven't seen in a worker placement game before. It gives players opportunities that they will have to fight for and also plan for in order to use them to the full effect. If you have a location that needs merit but it is one of the last rooms you may have an earlier location resolve to give you that merit, properly resolving the plan. The designated worker abilities give an abundance of strategy to the gameplay in which mages are sought and which mage will be necessary. This is further enhanced by the A side and B side of the mage powers, creating a unique variable setup. The last unique mechanism is the end-game scoring, having a random range of scoring possibilities means the players aren't sure of their focus until they start revealing the scoring paths throughout the game. You also don't want to give anything away to your opponents, so players have to be mindful to not appear over-eager towards a goal or else they may reveal what the voters secretly seek to the other players. If you enjoy unique worker placement games that have plenty of replayability, direct confrontation and a unique theme then Argent: The Consortium is one I can easily recommend. Level 99 has created a unique experience that seemed daunting at first but has quite thoroughly cast a spell over me.
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