Orléans is a "pool building" game, using wooden discs you pull from a bag instead of decks of cards. It's also a worker placement game, and it has an interesting tweak in this regard. Most games give you a number of identical workers you place somewhere on a board to take a particular game action. In Orléans, the worker discs come in a variety of colors, and you must place combinations of colors into a specific action slot in order to trigger them. Well-designed worker placement games always force hard choices ("I want to do this, but I also want to do that"), but this system adds a neat wrinkle to that: "I have all the workers I need to this, but I really want to do that and I only have two of the three colors I need." Do you take what you can get now, or save toward what you really want on a future turn?
Designer Reiner Stockhausen put a lot of clever balances into his design. You're constantly acquiring new worker discs, which dilutes your bag and can make it harder to draw the colors you want to use in each round. But here, the "trashing" mechanic so common to these sorts of games is a progression mechanism: assign a worker to fill a slot on the construction side board, and it will both permanently leave your pool and earn you money (or another reward). There's a juggling act here that I find more satisfying than the typical deck builder's "trash all your lame starting cards as fast as you can" strategy.
There are also multiple paths to victory, and in my experience, all of them seem viable. There's a merchant mechanic where you can travel around France trading in goods. There's that construction side board where you can squeeze out bonuses. Each new color of worker you can acquire advances you along its own track that comes with its own rewards each step of the way.
But I have a couple of minor reservations about Orléans. I still enjoy it, to be sure, but less I think than the gaming community at large. Those multiple avenues to victory are a double-edged sword, because it's up to the players to keep watch on them all. You yourself might not be trying to win a certain way, but one of your opponents might be. You have to keep tabs on everything, or the game will end in a blowout -- and this seems to mean that if you don't play the game regularly, if you're not familiar with all the ways to win, the winner is going to run away with it.
There's also an aspect to the worker placement that can really slow the game down. There are two stacks of tiles (Level I and Level II) that provide alternative places to place your workers for specific actions. When you advance on a particular game track, you get to look through one or both of those stacks -- at all the tiles -- and choose one to take; you and only you will be able to use it for the rest of the game. The number of options is overwhelming, too many to look through and process if you don't play the game regularly, and you will invariably end up pausing the game to wait for someone trying to make this choice. On the other hand, frequent play and familiarity with the tiles doesn't seem great either; with every choice available to you, you can always go for the couple of tiles you personally think are the best ones. You can always run the same strategy game after game, only being forced into something new if another player rushes to tile stack before you do.
These negatives about the game don't rise to the level of making me not want to play. I still enjoy Orléans, and I can see why some people really enjoy it. But I also think there are other games in the pool-building genre that I find a little more fun, a little easier to wrap your head around, or a little faster to play, without really sacrificing too much of Orléans' special sauce. I'd give it a B+. It would be a good game to keep more in rotation with my play group than we have. But I'd say it has worthy competition too.
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