Pillars of the Earth mini-review
Posted by Rob Herman at June 11th, 2007
Pillars of the Earth is an economy/resource game with a novel auction mechanic.
The economy/resource portion is solid if unremarkable. You deploy laborers (you get 12 every turn) to acquire raw materials (wood, stone, sand) and feed these resources to craftsmen to earn VPs. Craftsmen are like technologies; they stick around.
The auction mechanic is the neat part, and the one that really makes you think. There are about 15 privileges available, and each player will eventually get three of them. Some are decidedly better than others. For each player, three markers are placed into a bag, and one is drawn out. That player has the opportunity to either pay 7 gold (which is a lot) for the opportunity to choose any one privilege, or pass, which effectively boots that privilege-choice to the very end of the line. The next marker drawn costs 6 gold, the one after that 5, etc. The last few all cost nothing, and after that, passed markers are placed.
The game looks way more complicated than it is–it “fell into place” for me around halfway through the first game. It took 4 first-timers 2 hours to play; with veterans it would probably be 90 minutes, with setup, or 75 if you hurried. Production quality is good but not great–I didn’t much care for the decorative little wooden cathedral. On the other hand, the cards look nice and are helpfully backed.
The weird thing about the game is how luck-driven is it. As you said, the meat of the game is the phase in which everyone gets to place their three “master buiders” on different spaces — and some spaces are much better than others. Since the good spaces fill up quickly, you would expect people to take turns choosing them. Instead, the pieces are drawn randomly, so one person may get most of the good picks. (When I played, there was a round in which 3 of the last 4 builders to be drawn were all the same color.)
The idea is that this luck is balanced by the fact that the early people either have to pay gold or pass. I’ll have to play it again to see if that really balances it out — it does make the first few draws incredibly expensive, but half of them are still free, and 2/3s of them are so cheap that everyone really wants to be the next one drawn. You could definitely end up with very lucky or unlucky placement.
In addition to drawing those pieces, each round involves one die roll and draws from 4 decks. (The event deck is significant, as is the deck with special characters. The craftsmen and resource decks are less so, since the former is stacked and the latter is almost depleted each round.)
It’s weird, because it feels a lot as if a committee designed this game to be as “Euro-like” as possible…and then gave every mechanic a random factor. As I said, there are mitigating factors that let a skillful character respond to the luck, but I’m not sure yet what to think about it.
Dare I suggest an auction of some kind?
Apart from the master-builder selection, the randomness is all tame and manageable, just enough to keep analysis-paralysis from setting in and to make the games different. (But you’re right in that it does show up in darn near every mechanic.) I like the tricky prioritization.
I do wonder how well it would stand up to routine play. Playing without knowing what cards were coming was pretty fun. Playing 2 or 3 times to put it all into practice would be fun. After that, I’m not sure how much people will want to bring it out.
Maybe an auction would be better — though that would make the game even longer.
How about this: The first piece is drawn, and the owner has the choice to pay 7 to play it, or put it on the track. THEN, every player starting to the left of that one gets a chance to pay 7 to play. Only the piece that was actually drawn can end up on the “delay track”, or whatever it’s called — the other players are just choosing between leaving their pieces in the bag or digging one out. Then you repeat the pattern for the price of 6, and so on. There’s still a good deal of chance there, but someone who’s willing to pay a lot can jump in and play anyway. If pieces are still left in the bag when you get down to the free placements, then it reverts back to an entirely random draw.
Don’t take my complaints to mean that I don’t like the game. I’m just trying to choose between “good” and “really good”, and the master-builder draw is the biggest thing that I haven’t decided on yet. I agree that the rest of the randomness isn’t a big problem, but then again, I enjoy a lot of American games. I’m surprised to see so many Euro gamers raving about it.