Guild Academies of Valeria: Rapid Review

Guild Academies of Valeria: Rapid Review

Information:

Mechanics: Engine Builder, Action Drafting,  Tile Placement, Dice Worker Placement, Dice Drafting
Player Age: 14+

Player Count: 1 - 4 Players

Time to Play: 90 - 120 Minutes 
Game Designer: Stan Kordonskiy

Game Artist: Mihajlo Dimitrievski

Publisher: Daily Magic Games

Year Published: 2023

BGG Weight: 3.00

Rundown:

Once again we enter the whimsical world of Valeria but this time there's no monsters to focus on. Instead players are passing down the information they have learned to the next generation. Players will be drafting students (represented by dice), professors, and classrooms in order to educate the next generation of valerian residents. This is done until the students graduate (by gaining knowledge after value six) and go on quests of their own. The game is broken up into four rounds and each round will contain four phases; recruitment, education, questing and restoration.

Recruitment Phase:

In this phase each player has three workers that will be placed one at a time on one of the four dock options. This action selects an available die piece to be added to the player’s tableau (gardens). Then the player has two actions (one being optional) that will activate. Firstly they can either perform the action of the dock or gain gold by banking. This is done by gaining eight gold minus the value of the dice you drafted. For example the below image will give three gold.

Secondly the optional choice is to perform a bonus action as shown in the image below. By trading in gold for certain bonuses. Players can do these actions in any order. 

The interesting element to the dock actions is the cost. Each dock action has a cost of gold equal to the value printed on the die you drafted, so for financial reasons it can be better to draft lower dice. The four dock actions that can be taken rather than banking are explained below.

Castellan Dock:

This dock allows you to gain a grey town classroom tile. When any tile is gained it is immediately placed next to an existing tile in your tableu.

Ministry Dock:

The ministry dock allows for two things; place one of your three banners onto a green council member or move an existing banner onto another green/purple councillor.

The green council members give bonus benefits throughout the game such as reduced costs or wild students/professors. The purple council will unlock end game scoring opportunities. Council members can only hold one banner from each player at a time, however, each player before you will gain two points when you move there.

After placing a banner, the player can now gain one of the avaliable face-up favor chits. These tokens will give you a one time bonus of gold, magic, knowledge  dice, gaining a professor, or flipping dice. These tokens don't have to be activated immediately, they can be kept for the best moment later only . 

Fountain Dock:

The fountain dock allows you to choose a face-up professor and gain two knowledge to share among your dice in the garden. Professors are needed to send students to classrooms as most classroom tiles need one professor of a certain colour.

Benefactor Dock:

The benefactor dock allows you to gain one face-up guild classroom tile and add it to your tableu.

 

Education Phase:

The simultaneous education phase is when you allocate professors and students to classrooms in the pursuit of generating resources and graduating students. The classrooms will activate their benefits once all the allocation is completed, any knowledge or dice adjustment can only effect students in that classroom. Any leftover dice will move to the start of the garden to cover any icons. Any leftover professors will award the player one gold, and any visible resources on the garden will award that revealed resource. During this phase players can spend any amount of magic to teach students knowledge of that amount.

Questing Phase:

During the questing phase any graduated student can be allocated to one of the four face-up quests.

These quests require certain dice types and will get more difficult (with better rewards) as the game continues. Each player can resolve up to three quests in this phase but they cannot re-use students or achieve the same quest twice. At the end of this phase any quest completed this turn will be discarded, therefore paving the way for harder and more rewarding quests. All graduated students will now be discarded back to the dice bag, even any that weren't used, meaning players have to plan effectively when to graduate their students to get the best yield. 

Restoration Phase:

In the restoration phase the boards are refreshed and reset. All the ungraduated students (keeping their value the same) and professors will now return to the garden and faculty area. Each drafting section of the board will remove either the bottom one option or bottom two options (as shown on the board) to then be refreshed. The dice at the docks will return to the bag and be re-rolled to the player count plus one per dock. Lastly, the round marker will move one and the first player marker will be passed on.

Appeal:

Guild Academies of Valeria has a very unique theme that will immerse people as they build an academy from scratch; drafting professors, classrooms, and students. The other appealing aspect is how the dice are drafted. If you have played Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria (same designer), the dice have a greater benefit when drafted at a lower number but higher dice are needed to score better points. Guilds works in this same way. When drafting the dice the actions are cheaper to perform when the number is lower, however, lower dice will take more to graduate. At which value you take the dice is an interesting and challenging puzzle that the game commonly presents.

Placement:

During the game players will gain three types of tiles. Each can contain 1-2 guild symbols and an ability at the bottom. This ability will either relate to the way it scores or the classroom worker location (the professors and students required to activate the location and the benefits you will gain). Each corner of the tile can also contain part of a pedestal. If at any point four pedestals connect to become whole, the player can gain a bonus monument chip to place on top. These chips will either give one-time effects that are activated by flipping over, or they add certain coloured guild symbols and professors for end game scoring. The placement is also very important when it comes to benefitting from end game scoring so players should keep these goals in mind when placing their tiles.

Integrating Points:

A small abundance of points will be gained throughout the game everytime you perform most classroom actions. The main bulk of points, however, come with end-game scoring. When you choose to pivot your focus onto this type of scoring is very important. The two forms of end-game scoring involve upper council members and prestige tiles. Every time you perform two quests you will gain a prestige tile to add to your tableu. These tiles will score on the amount of guild symbols that appear on other tiles, the position of this prestige tile in relation to certain tiles, and/or the amount of professors you have.

To get to the upper council for your end game scoring you must already have the council token on the board and then use a move action to move up the council ranks. These council members will score based on your tiles (guilds and resource types generated) or based on the formation of the tiles (same guild symbols in a row or column at a height of 4+). 

Determination:

- Thoroughly enjoyed the differences of phases and how they all merge into a smart worker placement/engine building game.
- Tough choices when drafting dice based on the value, colour and dock you want to activate.
- Great range of strategies and diversity in methods to play the game.
- Can feel like a lot to take in at once.
- The rulebook felt a bit more confusing than some of the other Valeria games.

Guild Academies of Valeria felt very daunting when I first looked at it since there are various phases with different mechanics overlapping. Once you play one round of the game, though, everything felt quite seamless. This is a game that, once played, we had to play again the next day as we had a better understanding of the engine we were trying to build. You are building many different interconnected engines. Firstly, with the students and professors, players draft the colours and values they need to properly take advantage of their classroom and effectively graduate their students. The balance of this is no easy feat and requires players to take advantage of the many combos available throughout the game. The other important aspect is the tile placement. Players should focus on connecting the pedestals to build monuments that will help them throughout the game. While doing this you also have to consider how you are going to convert these tiles into numerous points at the end of the game. This game is really unique and uses the best of the world building and mechanics that Daily Magic have been developing with their Valeria series. If you are a fan of the longer Valeria games then this one is a no-brainer and should be added to your collection as soon as possible. For me, it has earned a Go-To Golden Seal.

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Guild Academies of Valeria on BGG

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