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Anthony Boydell
United Kingdom
Unspecified
Unspecified
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Brother Carolus, his tent-like tabard flapping about his bare knees like a flamenco dancer, staggered in from the Wintry gale carrying the sparse collection of vegetables that he had salvaged from the storm-wrecked garden.
Brothers Phillip and Antoine, looking up from their illuminatory diversions and eyed the meager harvest with disdain: ‘Your parsnip has withered’, said Br Phillip, ‘and your shriveled nuts will never fill Sister Kate’s hot pie afore evening’.
Brother Antoine, fake-serious in his artistic endeavor, sniggered into his ink-pot and drew a cock-and-balls in the margin of the Epistle to the Colossians. ‘No one will notice’, he muttered, ‘Br Dawkins keeps buying advertising space on the sides of Oxen and putting everyone off’.
Brother Carolus, brushing dry leaves from his chastity belt, replied: ‘It’s been a difficult year, my sons; a blight upon our potatoes…’
‘I blame that Iberian whore we sheltered in the Summer’ spake Br Phillip.
Br Carolus continued: ‘…and our pumpkins failed to swell…’
‘Where IS Sister Kate, by the way?’ asked Br Antoine.
‘…and I had terrible trouble with my grapes!’
‘That’ll be the hardwood benches…we really ought to weave some cushions’ said Br Antoine.
The three Friars stood silently for a moment, scratching their tonsures and fingering their rosaries, then retired to the Refectory to consume their paltry repast.
‘So, what shall we consider for our philosophic and theologic discourse tonight? The usual farming?‘ enquired Br Carolus, stroking a desiccated turnip.
Br Antoine frowned and answered: ‘I’m not sure I want to pursue the agrarian path with your miserable box of roots to taunt us – how about something new?’
Br Carolus reached into the folds of his ample robes: ‘We could try THIS’ he smiled, ‘recently arrived into the custody of Pater Richard of Wycombe-by-Hazlemere. He’s over at the Frog & Epidural playing 11XX with the Lay Preachers’
Br Carolus placed the illuminated casket upon the warped table – the scripted title shone out in gold leaf in the dismal candle-light: ‘Ora et Labora’. The reliquary was careful-decanted and the components arrayed across the stained oak: player boards, player extension boards, double-sided resource tiles, ‘the resource wheel’, decks of cards and wooden pawns.
‘So, ‘ said Br Phillip, ‘What is this all about?’
‘One must gain the most Victory Points by the collection and conversion of resources into valued resources, the acquisition of functional buildings and their careful placement against settlements – the more buildings a settlement touches, the better it is for scoring. Each player has an action which is one of:
- putting one of their pawns on one of their buildings to activate it’s function;
- paying another player to put one of their pawns on one of their buildings to activate it function; or,
- paying a number of resources to build a building.
In addition to the one action, players can also buy extension boards, convert wheat to straw and money to smaller money units (before and/or after their action). In each round, the ‘start player’ gets to do a second action.’
The resources have basic and converted sides, some worth FUEL or FOOD (needed for building point-escalating settlements) and some have VPs (1, 2, 3, 4 or 8). The buildings enable conversion from basic to complex, or from complex sets of varying composition into more sets and or VPs.
‘This sounds like Le Havre‘ said Br Antoine.
‘That’s because it pretty much IS Le Havre,’ replied Br Carolus, ‘only it takes an hour less to play.’
The three monks commenced a two hour interaction of collection, conversion, purchase, placement and escalation - with a little bit of jigsaw puzzle placement of built buildings and settlements- and, at least for two of them, it proved a satisfying, thoughtful exercise. Br Phillip (last place) lamented the time-taken and ‘a lot of thinking for very little return’ and pronounced it a ‘fail’ in his lowly, damned-to-Hell opinion. Brs Carolus (winner) and Antoine (just behind in second) were more positive, or maybe that was the effect of the fermented sprout cordial?
It really IS a solid Le Havre variant with that same element of interaction across the player buildings (I use mine or I use yours); do I take an action OR take resources? Buildings bought for VPs and shareable etc. The new chrome-y bits include the set order of building appearance (vs Le Havre's seeded but varied 'three columns'), the quirky money vs whisky/wine entrance fee mechanic (if you pay whisky/wine to use another’s building, they do the action for you BUT they get nothing in return – the drink is DRUNK!) and, of course, the excellent resource-tracking super Rondel that counts the games progress to (24 round) completion as well.
They liked it. Br Phillip, huffing and wheezing his complaints like a punctured bellows, retired for the night threatening a ‘stiff write-up’. Br Antoine remarked that Sister Kate often liked a stiff write-up herself and was roundly beaten to a purple, sobbing husk by an aggressively-drunk Br Carolus and his malformed courgette.
In Nomine Patre Et Uwe Et Spritus Sancti, Amen.
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