Like other reviewers I’m not particularly fond of this game. My expectations were quite high and I was hoping to find a worthy successor to Settlers. Having opened the box and checked out the very nice looking components and the rules I felt that the game had a fair shot at being exactly what I was anticipating. I have focused on the mechanisms of the game of which many are quite innovative. The problem is, together they equal less than the sum of their parts.

Gameplay
It is hard to get an overview of the game. In the later stages of the game there are a lot of different production facilities and since you often have to pre-plan production one turn in advance it becomes even harder. Especially since destructive locking up of resources is a key element of the game.

Virtual resources
The workers control the means of productions (don’t get your hopes up socialists; the profits are all spent on lavish palaces, the church and the military). This means you can’t produce resources and store them for later use. While this is an innovative concept is does not work well. The usual trade-off between building many cheap buildings and saving your resources for later in order to produce a few really massive buildings is thereby eliminated, taking away a normally very interesting strategic decision from the game.

Solitaire feeling
This is counter-intuitive but due to the fact that other players’ decisions have such a massive impact on your game play it is all but impossible to predict which resources and/or production buildings will be available during your next turn. The player’s therefore tend to favor conservative strategies in order to not have too many goods spoiled the following turn. This also leads to increasingly long turns and most of the game is spent waiting on other players to make moves that aren’t that interesting to follow. The box states a 60 minute minimum play time. I have a hard time imagining anyone playing the game in an hour, regardless of experience.

Defensive play is rewarded
Very often you find yourself in a situation where you can construct a building but not use it right away. In these cases it is nearly always right to abstain from constructing the building since there are no advantages to building anything except for the scoring buildings. A small bonus paid to the builder, like in Caylus, could probably offset this.

Small margins
The difference between success (which can land you four out of the nine points required for victory in a four player game) and complete failure leading to all of your resources being lost can sometimes be one move (from you or any of the opponents). This gives a chaotic feeling to the games and since all strategies are likely to resemble each other it is far from unlikely that turn order alone breaks the tie eventually.

Limited options
With all these mechanics in place I strongly feel that a mechanism for handling resources is lacking. It could be regular resource hoarding or something like the negotiation system in Settlers, the ability to partly construct building or something else but it ought to be something. The only thing that comes close is that you occasionally can eke out a few extra moves through skipping a few moves in your turn, thus ending up last (i.e. first) in the turn order track. This is far from always a feasible option though and when you use it you need to be extra careful not to have your resources spoil.

Summary
Is this a terrible game? No. The concept is interesting and the game does not appear to be broken in any significant way. It is just that it requires a lot of thinking from a player. Not that I mind that, quite the opposite. But when the reward is as small as with this game I’d much rather play a filler game for the same amount of fun or choose one of many Euros of equal complexity that offer much better game play.

Disclaimer: To cover my back I should probably add that it is possible that the game simply is meant for three players (though it has been chosen for the upcoming Europemasters where it will be played with four players). Some of the posters seem to suggest this. Also, maybe if you’re more experienced some of the mentioned problems will be manageable. However, I feel very reluctant to play the game ever again and a good game should not require a multitude of very long gaming sessions to be enjoyable let alone acceptable.