Game-alot

I'm hardly alone in liking board games from designer Stefan Feld. Time and again over many years, he's delivered wonderfully calibrated systems to entertain and challenge. He is, quite simply, one of my favorite game designers. The truth is, though, that he still has some games out there I haven't tried... and that was even before he went on a binge in the last couple of years and released several more. But over the past few months, I've been able to try out several of his more recent offerings.

Merlin is an unusual game that defies easy description. Players each position a marker on a wheel of possible action spaces, along with a single "Merlin" marker. Each round, every player rolls their own set of four dice: three in their color and one the color of Merlin. You then use the resulting rolls to take four actions. The dice of your color move your piece clockwise around the wheel, and you take the action you land on -- thus, the order in which you choose to use your dice affects which actions you take. The one die of the Merlin color can move the Merlin piece clockwise or counterclockwise; again, you do the action of where you land, but since every player can move Merlin once in a round, you don't know if he'll be in the same place the next time you get to choose.

There's a wide array of actions to choose from, and I think trying to explain them would get too far into the weeds to be comprehensible without visual aids. Suffice it to say, the game incorporates area control on more than one axis, a set collection system of sorts, a "disaster avoidance" mechanic you have to juggle, and various other ways of scoring points that reward leaning hard into particular sub-strategies. It's a fairly large matrix of options.

I do think Merlin has a clever degree of "indirect interaction" with your opponents. It feels to me like it has a pretty solid balance between the ability to make plans of your own, and suddenly having to recalibrate in response to what your opponents do. Another plus, your opponents' actions aren't inevitably "disruptive" to your plans. Because players all get to move Merlin once each round, another player's decision to move him can suddenly change what options you have if you move him. This can either thwart you or open up new possibilities, depending on the situation.

But it's also possible that the dice inject a little too much randomness into the game. Merlin plays faster than some Stefan Feld games, but it's still more involved than most dice games. A strategy you attempt to get involved early may fail you not because of bad planning, but because you simply fail to roll the numbers that let you take those actions again. Plenty of popular games are built on dice, and I even enjoy my share of them... but I do feel that generally speaking, when the role of luck increases, the game length probably should decrease. I'm not sure Merlin falls outside the sweet spot -- I'd actually like to play it more -- but I do have some doubts, particularly compared to other Stefan Feld games that hooked me almost immediately.

Merlin is actually not only a Stefan Feld game; for this effort, he teamed with Michael Rieneck. It's not that I'd scapegoat Rieneck for not loving this game as much as some Feld efforts. He was a co-designer on The Pillars of the Earth and World Without End (among others), and I quite enjoyed them both. It just might be that this particular collaboration didn't yield top notch results.

But again, my reservations are largely just because the bar is so high when Stefan Feld's name is on the box. I do hope to try Merlin again, though that may be a tall order considering just how many Feld games out there I truly love. For the moment, I'd give Merlin a B+.