This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: 7 Wonders
Designer: Antoine Bauza
Year: 2010
Country: France
Publisher: Repos Production
7 Wonders is a light and easy to learn civilization game in which you develop your manufacturing base, upgrade your armies, develop trade and construct your wonder by playing cards from your hand onto the table. Playing a card with stone means that you now produce one stone on your turn. If there’s a card that requires one stone to be played, you can now play it.
The game is divided into three eras. In the first two, you can play cards to build your tableaux or gain points, but in the third era there are no more resource cards and it becomes all about winning. This shift from building the engine to running the engine is an important strategic choice in many games, but here it’s been built into the mechanism of the game itself.
If you don’t have all the resources you need, you can spend money to buy them from other players. This is not a negotiation. If you pay two coins, you can buy wood from a player next to you who produces it. They don’t lose the resource, so it’s a win-win. You can also play cards which decrease the costs of this process, up until it’s zero so basically you can use the resources of your neighbors at will.
The game’s most distinctive feature is that after everyone has played their card, you pass your hand to the next player. This means that each hand rotates around the table, from player to player, dwindling until the era ends with only one unplayed card left for each hand.
Because of this mechanic, you can form a pretty good idea of what your opponents are able to do. After all, you just saw their hands. Sometimes you’re unable to play a really good card, and then it somehow survives the entire round and rotates back to you. This is a joyful moment!
As a fan of civilization games, this was fun because of its speed and accessibility. I felt like I was able to execute strategies in my first game.