Joan of Arc: Orléans Draw & Write comes from Ryan Hendrickson and Reiner Stockhausen, built on the structure of Stockhausen's original Orléans. In the manner of many "and write" games, each player has their own personal sheet on which they mark off different areas during the game to amass points. But instead of rolling dice (where the "roll and write" genre really started, no doubt inspired by Yahtzee), players pull worker tokens of different colors from a bag, then draft those to dictate how they can mark their sheets.
Many "and write" games hit a personal limit on how much I enjoy them in how they handle simultaneous play. In a lot of these games, it's possible that every player faces exactly the same choice as everyone else at every juncture of the game. ("Everyone picks one of these three things; which will you choose?" or "Everyone must draw this shape on their grid right now; where will you draw it?") Those games can be fun, but some part of me is a little annoyed at the ultimately solitaire nature of that activity: if each of the players theoretically could have made exactly the same choices from beginning to end, I feel like it undermines the notion that this was actually a collective activity. Bottom line: I need some satisfying level of player interaction.
Joan of Arc provides all of that I could ever want. It does that in part by eliminating the simultaneous play that's typical of "and write" games. Each round begins by drawing tokens from the bag -- one more than the number of players. Everyone then draws one token in turn order, with the first player taking the last remaining token before passing the "first choice" to the next player for the following round. This does make Joan of Arc take longer than many "and write" games, but you get a lot more strategic maneuvering for your time. Limiting options for your downstream opponents is an important consideration, as is cultivating backup plans for when your upstream opponents limit you.
To the extent that I remember the gameplay of the original Orléans, I can also say that Joan of Arc has proxies for much of it that also increases the amount of player interaction. There's an array of upgrades that each can only be claimed by one player, sparking both a tense race and the need to realign your strategy to what you're able to actually get. There are multiple tracks where players are in competition to earn a bonus reward for being the first of the group to reach a given milestone. There's a regional map where players are trying to establish buildings in cities; each city can be built in just once, so as one player claims one, everyone else has to scratch it out.
Reinterpreting Orléans with different mechanisms has yielded all these benefits. (Plus, of course, the "name brand" recognition among gamers.) But there's also a bit of baggage Joan of Arc picks up in going this route. The game keeps all the iconography of Orléans for the sake of continuity (and perhaps also to drive home how many concepts are similar to the original). But all that iconography was designed in 2014, so the sense of style in games has evolved a lot since then. And it was all originally designed to be shown much larger than can be done on the sheets given to each player; symbols are teeny tiny, and a couple in particular (the grey and brown workers) are practically indistinguishable in anything but the kind of brilliant light that no gamer I know actually has at their play table. In short, it feels quite easy (almost even inevitable) to make a mistake in this game, in ways that an updated art design could have preempted.
But in terms of the gameplay experience? I've played Joan of Arc a few times, and would gladly play it more. At the moment, I'd rate it a B+. It's possible that, in the way of its big brother Orléans, it's destined to become the "and write" game I like most among those I don't play often? But I'm hoping not.
No comments:
Post a Comment