Ardevur
- Board's Eye View
- 26 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Gabriele Areolite has come to board game design after a career in the mining industry so it doesn't come as a surprise that Ardevur, from Hashtag 64, is themed around the mining industry. The title of the game is a construct of the Afrikaans words Aarde (earth) and Vuur (fire). Subtitled 'The Game of Resources', it's an economic game where the mechanics and underlying economics of exploration for and extraction of resources feels rather less abstract than in the majority of other games sharing a similar theme.
In Ardevur, the 2-4 players are the CEOs of competing mining corporations, each with its own unique asymmetric advantage - likely to direct your strategy. This 'Middlesea' edition of the game focuses on Africa and Europe, divided into eight regions and 24 territories - so with the outward appearance of a Risk variant. Ardevur, however, is not a war game. Players are juggling permits, cash flow and supply chains in order to exploit the reserves in the territories for which you have mining rights.
Although the game mirrors the real-world industry, and there's a fair bit to manage, it's all made manageable by Ardevur's clear and logical turn structure. That means that tho' this certainly isn't a light game, it doesn't impose the barrier of an overly daunting rules overhead before you can play. Players start off with some assigned territories, some basic assets and 32 million in currency. That may sound like a lot but mining is an expensive business where you need to spend money to make money. You'll have to commit quite a lot of capital before your mines are profitable, and you'll also need to develop your infrastructure; for example, building warehouses so you can store more of the minerals that you extract from your mines.
Timing is important too in Ardevur, just as it is in the real world. Often in games, factories and other buildings spring magically into full production as soon as you pay for them. Not so in Ardevur, where developing and upgrading your assets takes time as well as money. You can always raise cash by selling your zinc, copper, nickel or gold locally as soon as you pull them from the ground but the price you'll get for resources you sell this way may be half what you might expect to achieve by getting your metals to a more mature global market. You need to weigh up the cash flow advantage and certainty of a quick local sale against the potentially much higher rewards of exporting your minerals to sell later, tempered with the risk that that later sale may be subject to the vagaries of market fluctuations. Of course, if you offer metals for immediate local sale, there's always a possibility that a competitor who has the storage capacity in that region might decide to snap them up to sell on at a higher price...
Ardevur is an economic game but it isn't just about making the most money. Players are competing to hit the various displayed achievements that will earn them points towards victory. It's a highly interactive game, so at its best with a full complement of four players. At times it can feel semi-cooperative, as players pay to make use of each other's logistic networks, but you mustn't allow that to lull you into a false sense of security: running a mining conglomerate is a cutthroat business!
Shown here on Board's Eye View is the standard edition of Ardevur. It's well produced, including trays used for displaying the components during play, but members of our team were left coveting the deluxe edition that upgrades the cardboard tokens. The minerals in the deluxe edition look even more metallic, tho' still not real gold :-) We were excited to learn that Hashtag 64 have plans to publish further titles in the Ardevur series: standalone games covering the mining industry in Asia and Australia, and in the Americas, each with their own particular industry focus but ultimately combinable to create a global megagame! As it is, you can expect this first standalone to run to around two hours.
