Trial by Troyes

Having convinced Sam he should buy Troyes (rather than Shipyard — I was going by the BGG ratings: Troyes 35 — Shipyard 126), I felt it only right that I offer to learn the rules. I relish learning the rules to a new game — as long as it's on my own time. I take very little pleasure in trying to get up to speed on the rules to a game which everybody already knows, whilst playing, but sitting down with the game and rulebook, and keeping the BGG forums handy to answer questions, is a lovely way to spend an hour or so. At least I think so.

Troyes, like so many of these games we love, has a relatively poorly-written rulebook.

But boiled down to its essence, the game is pretty straightforward; there are three areas in the city; the palace, the bishopric and the city hall, in which you can place meeples. These meeples represent your influence in the military (red), religious (white) and mercantile (yellow) areas, and determine how many of each coloured dice you get to roll.

These dice are your actions for the turn, though you can also buy dice from other players.

The dice are used to activate activity cards , combat events that threaten the city, construct the cathedral, and add meeples to the three areas, increasing your share of the dice in subsequent turns. So far so euro-by-numbers (apart from the dice).

Added to this are a couple of interesting features:

The influence track — this is a point track that you can use to affect your dice rolls; one influence will allow you to re-roll a dice, and four points will allow you to turn up to three of your dice to their reverse side (great if you roll a bunch of ones or twos). Influence is relatively easy to come by, and your spcae on the track will tend to ebb and flow during the game.

The other interesting thing is the 6 special characters — each player at the start of the game gets one of these and keeps it secret. Each of them gives points at the end of the game for various things — 5, 10 or 15 points on the influence track, for instance. The thing with these is that all players will receive these points, not just the person holding the card, so while each player has a secret objective, if you can deduce it correctly you can make sure you too collect influence and reap the rewards.

After several aborted attempts to wrap our heads round it, on the third try it seemed to stick, and Sam and I managed a two-player game during teatime the other day.

It's very thinky — there's a smattering of maths involved; the various activity cards that come up have what amounts to a quadratic equation on them; 1 to 3 red dice divided by n, gives you x attempts at y. It seems an odd layer of complication or obfuscation, and neither of us is sure it is entirely neccessary. But at the end of the game, I felt it was a satisfying experience, and want to delve back in to better understand what's possible.

It's almost like an evolved euro — one where there really are many many options of different kinds, and if you can wrap your head around them there are some very creative ways to score points. And it's pretty. At least I think so.