Weak Link

I've owned the board game Augsburg 1520 for a while now -- it's the 3rd of the "Alea medium box" game series, and I've been hooked into collecting them all. But up until recently, it had been a while since I'd played it. And I also noticed that I'd never reviewed the game here.

In Augsburg, you try to acquire "debt certificates" for a group of five different influential nobles. You and the other players bid against each other, to see who is willing to give up the most of their certificates for a given noble (conceptually, your "sway" over them) to achieve a particular action at a particular time. Those actions can net you more certificates to look at, money to procure the cerificates you see, and victory points.

Frankly, it's a disappointing game. Of the four now in that series, it's the weakest. If you look to the best games of the "Alea big box" series -- Puerto Rico or Notre Dame, for example -- it's a hallmark of those games that there are multiple viable paths to victory all balanced fairly well against one another.

Augsburg 1520 only really has one way to win -- you may have noticed that of the three things I mentioned earlier that you can get for your actions, only one is victory points. Sure, to keep winning those, you will need those debt certificates and the money to pay for them. But in my experience with the game (a few sessions here and there, spread out over years), the winner always achieves his victory in exactly the same way. It's a deep enough game to require you to think just a bit to realize the key moments to exploit for victory, but once you do, the game offers nothing more to explore. And "stopping" a player from pursuing victory only really takes the form of trying to do the exact same things faster than anyone else can.

I brought the game out recently because I had the notion to try to play every game in my collection at some point during 2009. But now that I've crossed this game off that list, I don't expect it to make another appearance. Hell, I'd probably even consider selling the game.

...Though there is that matter of no longer having the whole "medium box" collection if I did. Curse you, Alea, and your game numbering!