Guildlands
- Board's Eye View
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
There is no shortage of tile-laying city building games so this game is entering an already crowded space but Guildlands is nonetheless a novel game. It's designed by Ken Boyter and Kedric Winks, and it's published by Outset Media, with art from Laszlo Riba. Guildlands takes 2-6 players and the novel element is its asymmetry: each player represents a particular guild (merchants, gardeners, wizards, druids, road toll collectors and the city watch), each with slightly different actions available to them on their turns and each with totally different objectives and different end-game scoring.
Players will all be collectively constructing the city. As a mandatory action, you all always have the option of selecting and placing out a tile or rotating an already placed tile that's not completely surrounded, but most guilds offer the option of a unique mandatory action - so, for example, the druids can peek at the face-down tile on top of the draw pile before choosing a tile to lay and the city watch can rotate two tiles. In addition, each guild has their own distinct set of 'special actions', tho' these all include the option of placing or moving one of your two workers. This isn't a 'worker placement' game, however - workers aren't placed out to select actions but simply to protect the tile they are on from being rotated.
You can earn a coin on your turn if you lay a tile that makes a run of three tiles with the same symbol. Coins are worth points in end-game scoring but they can also be spent in the game to take an additional action and, in effect, give you an extra turn...
What makes Guildlands really interesting are each guild's different objectives and way of scoring. Some are admittedly easier to grok than others. The Road Toll Collectors' Guild scores for each tile in the longest unbroken road in the city, and the Gardeners' Guild scores for trees in areas comprising at least four directly connected green spaces. The City Watch Guild scores for watch towers connected to city walls, but only if a tower is on the city's perimeter, and the Wizard Guild scores for wizard towers that are positioned so that they form the four corners of a rectangle...
As with most asymmetric games, players may be focused on achieving their own scoring objectives but they need to know what their opponents' objectives are so that they can frustrate them: to win in Guildlands you'll need to engage in 'take that' actions to limit the scoring of your opponents. You will need to make judicious use of your worker meeples to protect your scoring potential.
We found our shared cityscape built rather quickly because turns are generally brisk. The game ends when all 52 tiles have been placed, so player count doesn't greatly affect playing time: even at higher player counts you can expect to finish a game in less than 60 minutes.
