Charterstone is a worker placement game by Jamey Stegmaier, the designer of another worker placement game I quite enjoy: Viticulture. Instead of real-world wine-making, Charterstone is simulating the construction of a village in a fantasy land, at the behest of the always-cranky Forever King. Each of up to 6 players has an area of their board, their "charter," in which they will focus their efforts to develop the village and their strategy.
Of course, as a legacy game, Charterstone is made to be played multiple times, with permanent changes and additions to the game accumulating from one play to the next. The game leans into this with extensive stickering of the board, and many reveals of new components and mechanisms. Where it doesn't lean into it so much is in the story. Fans of earlier games in the legacy genre may expect a detailed plot with twists and turns along the way. Charterstone has only a little more story than a non-legacy worker placement game, which is to say it has a threadbare wrapper that provides logic and context for the actions players take, and little more.
For the first one or two playthroughs, fans of worker placement games might find Charterstone a little unsatisfying. As in Viticulture, the act of placing a single worker is rather simple and doesn't yield much, and you have to build to big things over time. But, this being a legacy game, the range of things you can do is quite constrained at the start. Some critics have likened the first few games to feeling like a "tutorial," which isn't an entirely unfair comparison.
Once you get a few games in, though, Charterstone reveals a detailed array of options that really engaged my play group. One mechanic in particular (which I suppose I shouldn't go too much into, as you could call that a spoiler) really leads to more power in each player's hands, and also offers up some intriguing strategic variations. If this were a conventional worker placement game, it would be the mechanic that sold me on it being worthwhile, fun, and distinct.
The legacy design of Charterstone doesn't force new mechanics into the game on its own with any regularity. This is both a plus and a minus. The designer has abdicated on pushing new mechanics onto the players at a particular pace, or walling players off from unlocking things too quickly. Some may think the experience should have been more curated. On the other hand, with the players free to progress at whatever pace they're comfortable with, the game really will be different from one group to the next. My group pushed pretty hard, and by the time game 2 was winding down, we were really finding it to be a fun experience.
Buildings change and grow in power, and your strategy changes with it. But the board is large enough that your focus will naturally drift to the the things in your "charter." Furthermore, a few late story developments also push hard on the players and discourage them from looking toward other players' charters. This actually works against the game, possibly making it peak around game 10. Players who've struggled through the overall campaign won't have the most efficient engine in their own charter, and focusing there will continue to be a losing proposition. Players who have found and built an exciting engine in their own charter will feel no incentive to look elsewhere for another. The overall campaign scoring is set up in such a way that you're not completely out of it just because you didn't win individual games. Still, if you've finished last a bunch? You may feel you have no hope with still more games to go.
I don't mean to sound too down on it, because our group did like it overall. We'd all consider picking up the "recharge pack" to start the campaign again from scratch. We'd probably also give a go at using the game's "evergreen" rules to play with the board we ended up with after the campaign.(I'm a bit skeptical of that playing well. Though even if it turned out not to be good, we got what we wanted out of the legacy experience).
In all, there are plenty of clever ideas here, and for around 8 games of the 12-game campaign, it's in a real sweet spot that had us all looking forward to the next time we played. Eight fun playthroughs of the same game is a real accomplishment in my group, which is always pushing ahead to the new. Worker placement fans will probably want to check out Charterstone. Fans of a more story-driven legacy experience, hoping for choices that impact more than just mechanics, may have reason to be more cautious. Overall, I'd grade the experience a B+.
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