On a player’s turn, a player must place one of his workers from his player mat onto a location on the board, and then he must execute the action associated with that location. Do you spend a turn capturing your Artisan back or leave it on the board knowing your opponent may do the same? You can also usually convert those captured workers in to gold – assuming you are able to get them into the prison at some point.

It’s very easy to learn the new actions and features, and if you don’t feel confident using them, you can still compete just using the base game actions. A worker sent to build allows the player to work either on the Cathedral or build one of their own building plans, giving them either an instantaneous effect or another way to score points or virtue at game’s end, as well as an amount of VP for building it. Three players works pretty well, but there’s a rule that in two and three-player games you capture two sets of workers instead of one when going to the Town Center.Here are some of our more lighthearted things to show we're not all about the Serious Business of games. As you assign your army of workers to these spaces, you collect up tokens that represent these resources, and these tokens can be cashed to create the buildings that award you victory points. The first difference - and the one that stands out the most - is the Take That of capturing your opponents’ pieces off the board.

This concept carries out throughout the game, allowing you to accrue massive amounts of wealth and building materials.

Laid before each player is a board that promises riches beyond compare – a veritable cornucopia of free-flowing natural resources. The North Sea Trilogy is well loved by many with Raiders of the North Sea being highly rated and recently turned into an app. The more workers you put in the same spot, the more likely an opponent (or the AI) is to take your workers into custody. The AI scores their stuff too, but as they don’t collect resources (except the most valuable one, marble), they score differently for their achievements, based on the chosen difficulty level. I also discovered videogames in the meantime, but there’s something about the tactile feel of cardboard and cards!

It involves placing “one or more pawns on a play surface to claim the right to do a specific action. Fall to low on it and you will gain negative end game point and not be welcome to help build the cathedral, but you will be able to pay less tax. Production areas (Quarry, Forest, Mines, Silversmith) – When you place your worker here, you get an amount of stuff based on how many workers you have there (the formula for each is printed right under the title of the space). You have to discard 1x Building card (from your ha That might mean your third worker in the Quarry nets you three pieces of stone, instead of one if it was your first worker placed there.Finally, this expansion included new building and apprentice cards, both of which can simply be combined with the base game’s cards.

Gaining virtue will provide the player with rewards, but its presence in the game implies that you can be a prick as well. Sure, maybe you don’t really need five stone but that’s so much stone and it can all be taken away so quickly so you’d best gorge yourself while you can. As with almost every space on the board, the more workers they have assigned there the more effective the action becomes.

Architects is actually a perfect example of a sort of cultural shift that’s happened in board gaming over the last few years. I haven’t had a chance to get six players around a table yet to try it (thanks Covid-19), but having played with four, I can see how six would be chaotic, and a lot of fun.