Scraps From the Table

In my recent review of Glen More, game #6 in the Alea "medium-box series," I mentioned discovering that the series already had a 7th installment, Artus. This too was added to my collection.

I said of Glen More that it was the most involved game in the series since the first, Louis XIV. If I had to try to compare Artus to one of the earlier games, I'd say it's most like Palazzo. Artus isn't too deeply concerned with storytelling or theme. (It's about knights jockeying for the most politically advantageous spots at King Arthur's round table, but you feel that only because you're told that.) Ultimately, Artus is a fairly abstract game with simple rules -- and deep analysis stemming from those rules.

Longtime design team Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer have created this basic scenario. A large disc with point values (some positive, some negative) rotates in the center of a number of "chairs" arranged in a circle. Players have their pieces distributed in those chairs. On his turn, a player plays a card that moves a knight a number of spaces; it scores points equal to the value of the chair it's leaving, and then displaces the knight from the space it's arriving on (pushing that knight to the first empty seat counterclockwise). Other cards are played to move the royalty pawns at the table (belonging to no one player), or to promote the lesser "princes" into the "king." Whenever the king moves, or a new king is crowned, the entire table rotates according to the king's new position... and the point values of seats rotate with it.

Additional cards players must use during the game require you to score certain configurations of your own pawns. Many of them require you to put pawns in strategically bad positions -- but you must play the card eventually, so the game lies in trying to mitigate the bad effects of scoring. (That is, accept that your knight has to be on a seat worth negative points... just not too many negative points.)

If it sounds at all complicated, it's really not. Within a turn or two of seeing it, every player I've ever played with grasped it quickly. What isn't as clear is how to win, strategically speaking. Part of that comes from a good place, from a simple rules set with several possibilities each time you take a turn. (Which card do you play?) But some of the challenge comes from pure chaos and uncertainty. With each other player's move potentially displacing one of your knights -- or outright rotating the entire table and scoring structure -- it's essentially impossible for you to plan ahead for any move. All you can do is look at the situation you've received at the start of your turn, and then make the most of it right in that moment.

And so I haven't quite made up my mind about the game yet. It's interesting. It's easy to teach. It's actually rather quick to play, too. But I'm not yet convinced that luck doesn't play a rather large role in it. The game may be better off played with only three players (or even two) than the maximum four possible.

If I had to assign a grade right now, off of just a few plays, I'd say the game gets maybe a B-. But I could see revising that up a couple notches to B+, or down as far as a C, depending on how it holds up to multiple plays. It's not a bad game, though, so it's worth keeping my seven-game collection intact.