More Gaming

When a friend of mine showed me his new copy of the board game Glen More, I was excited to learn that a new game had come out in the "Alea medium-box" game series. I had maintained a complete collection of the five games before it, and unless the game was a total dud, I'd be picking up this new one too. (When I went to shop for it online, I learned that I'd been so out of the loop that there were actually two games in the series I didn't have yet. But I'll get to the other one, Artus, in a future post.)

Glen More is a hybrid of game styles, reminiscent of several other individual games, but just different enough to stand apart as something different. Each player builds up his own network of square tiles, placing each new one edge to edge into his existing pattern. Depending on how you place a newly acquired tile (which must be placed adjacent to a worker token on one of your tiles), you get to execute the actions associated with a handful of tiles in your network. Tiles generate and manipulate resources, and you sell those resources off for victory points in a variety of ways. Several of these ways put you in competition with your opponents, as certain ways of scoring depend on the lead you have over all other players in gathering a specific type of resource.

But the most direct method of competition between players comes in how tiles are obtained. Players do not take turns around the table in clockwise order. Instead, an array of just over a dozen tiles is placed in a circular track on a separate board, with player tokens taking empty spaces on that board. The token at the back of the pack is always the next to act. Its owner jumps ahead to the tile he wants to acquire, skipping over as many intervening tiles as he wants. If you jump far enough ahead when your opponents then content themselves to take leftover tiles in the middle, those opponents may each get two or more extra turns before your next opportunity rolls around. So every turn, you must make a decision to go for quantity or quality.

I've played the game a few times now. I've been utterly crushed at it, and have also managed to win it. At both extremes, I found the decisions to be interesting without being overly complicated (because it seems like all the different resources have viable paths to victory). Designer Matthias Cramer has managed to take many familiar elements of other games and mix them together into something that, while not revolutionary, is probably the most solid entry the "medium-box game series" has had since it began (with Louis XIV). It's also more complicated than just about any other game in that series, though, so your mileage may vary.

I hope to play Glen More again in the near future, and look forward to exploring its different strategies. Though I probably need more plays to settle into a solid rating, it's looking like a B+ to me at the moment. And to think, it had slid completely under my radar until my friend sprang it on me.