Logging a Play

Monday. Unable to cajole any gamers to the house, and with Stan off to pastures new (music? pah) I decided to play through Lignum - the game of wood-drying!

Okay it's not just drying wood. There's loads of other stuff going on too, like chopping wood, carrying wood, selling wood, and finding a saw in the forest, with which you can saw wood.

The rather complex game was complexified still further by the fact the woodcarriers in the rulebook are green and the ones in the box were purple. The purple was very similar to the brown woodcutters, meaning it was easy to confuse them - especially in a forest as dark as this.

Your objective is to be the richest logger at the end of the game, and there are only two ways to make money - selling wood from your shop, and completing tasks, which could be thought of as orders from a remote customer. You can sell any wood you like, but you'll make more money off hardwood and you'll make more money if you hire a sawyer to mill it. And of course, you'll make more money if your wood is dry - the dryer the better.

The game plays rather like Wallenstein, only without the fighting/card reveals/cube tower. Over two years you head out into the forest and have three seasons to maximise your returns, before the onset of winter. When the snows arrive, not only are wood returns minimal at best, you also need to burn wood to stay warm (and eat food. But you don't worry about food in the other seasons, when I guess you're grazing the shrubs as you make your way through the forest)

In the forest then there's a path that all players make their way along. There are specific locations where you can hire the aforementioned cutters, carriers, and sawyers, and also places to claim a task for yourself, or do planned work, which will give you a juicy benefit in the future.

The reason you might skip over the planned work (and other spots) however is that you can go as far as you like along the path, and you might want to grab something further ahead. Taking your time can work, hoovering up what others have left behind, but it's less likely to prove successful than the 'strolling' tactic in Heaven and Ale, where you feel the pressure lift as everyone races off ahead of you and abandon the point-scoring opportunities in favour of triggering shed rewards. Why? Because Lignum is all about the planning. After everyone reaches the end of the path, all the woody stuff you collected can be activated - cutters cut, carriers carry, sawyers saw and your millworker - you only have one! - can do any one of these things, but only one. Your strolling along picking up leftovers might well blow up in your face at this point, as you find you have sawyers with no saws, carriers with no mode of transport (they can still carry, but far less effectively) or even cutters with nothing to cut!

The cutting is where Lignum gets a bit feisty. The forest that the path snakes around contains six cutting areas which grow a little more foresty over each season. At the start of each season players choose secretly which cutting area they're taking their woodcutters to, and if players choose the same area then turn order decides who cuts first - and that's another reason why strolling up the path could backfire, as if you're last to a cutting area you might find all that's left is some crappy pine.

You can pay a dollar to move your cutters to another area, but money in Lignum is exceedingly tight - as well as being the victory condition it's also - inevitably - required to hire workers and buy equipment during the game. And if winter comes and you're short of food or firewood, there are rather debilitating punishments as you're forced to pay top dollar to make up the shortfall.

The potential saviour in such a tight economy is the existence of crafts. In what is a bit of a thematic stretch, developing three crafts allows you to turn them into huts, which can function, essentially, as extra workers or speedy drying techniques. Because crafts are free to develop and workers are paid, this can be a boon - but on the other hand while you're casually picking up craft tokens in the forest, others might be grabbing other stuff you need!

I liked Lignum. It's maybe not a Tuesday night game - Martin would rather have needles in his eyes - but I'd be keen to revisit it some other night, perhaps with all of us wearing plaid. Outside of one or two thematic idiosyncrasies, it all makes sense and I found it less complicated to learn and play than its BGG rating. An initially dry-Euro impression gave way to a tension on the board that I can imagine would only increase with more players - watching wood dry was more fun than it sounded.