by MarshalN
There are lots of reviews for this game already, so I'm not going to bother with all the stuff that you've read a million times about already - rules, mechanics, components, etc. Those are all said and done. I'd like to talk about the game and what I think about it, which is probably what a review should do anyway...I've played this game a few dozen times, online and off. Let's start with the positives - I think the game is quite elegant, a sentiment that many share. It's a tranquil Euro game. You take stuff, you build stuff with it, and you score points for the stuff you build in different ways. The variety in the game comes from the random tile draw, and I suppose a bit from the dice as well. There are, as befitting any Euro, multiple paths to victory, and in the games I've played it's usually not very clear who's going to win until the last few rounds.
The game has reasonable replayability. The different boards provide for different types of strategies - although, it also forces you to do certain things at certain times, so the strategy is not necessarily of your own choosing but rather what you've been handed (and whatever perceived imbalance there is, such as board 8). This I personally find to be a bit of a problem - if you get board 8, for example, you really have to milk that pasture and finish the other sections quickly to get the most out of the score. Likewise, if you're on board 2 and you didn't get to finish your 8 building set, you probably didn't win. Not always, but more likely than not. I think prefer games where you can change strategy on the fly depending on how other people play, instead of being forced down a certain path because your board told you to.
This game is probably at its best for games with only two players - another sentiment that seems to be shared among BGGers, since the voted preferred player count for this game is two. With two players, the game is quite tactical - you more or less have an idea what your opponent might go for, and you have a choice in most cases to choose whether or not you want to block your opponent from doing certain things. Competition over things like castles is also more zero sum, so if you don't get it, your opponent very well might (unless of course constrained by board position). There is also less downtime in two players, so you are mostly engaged in playing the game.
With 3, or worse, 4, I find that much of the elegance missing, and the game is reduced more to the "competitive solitaire" that some people have likened this game to. There are usually enough tiles on the board at any given time that most of your blocking is fairly meaningless - and because early leads usually evaporate by mid-game, "blocking the leader" isn't necessarily a good idea. At any rate, one player can't block three, so what I find happening a lot more in a 3 or especially 4 player environment is that people generally just mind their own business with occasional fights over specific tiles, especially near the end game. Boats are also more plentiful, but some boards have more need for a better boat position than others (the aforementioned board 2, for example) some players simply choose to not bother with taking too many boats in favour of other things. This limits the player interaction which I find unsatisfying.
Moreover, I wonder why Feld decided that each player should perform their actions completely before going to the next player. I am not sure if anyone's tried, but has anyone attempted the game with each player using one die first (player chooses), then going around again with the second? This seems to have some advantages over the current rules. First, the downtime is less - you have to be engaged throughout the round instead of just at end beginning or end, if you happen to be going first or last. Second, and more importantly, you can now see what your opponents are trying to do that round and can take action to slow them down or to block them entirely. Currently it is very difficult to do this especially in the earlier part of the game, where a player can lock down up to three tiles in one phase and then just place them over time within the same phase. This can often complete an area on the board and give a big points boost - points that would be harder to get if the other players could see it coming and take remedial action, if they so choose.
This comes to my biggest problem with the game - the strategy in this game, if you can call it that, is basically "which tile should I get now to get me the most points?" Yes, many games are like this, but in CoB the calculations are relatively simple - you know exactly how many points your action will get you, and because of the difficulty in blocking, especially in 3-4 players, you have little ability to predict the tradeoff in points for your opponent based on your move. Sometimes it's obvious (I'm going for the cows that my opponent needs to finish) but oftentimes it's ambiguous (I can take the church or the market, but my opponent just needs one building and he doesn't really care which one he gets based on his board and what's out there). So you just end up choosing whatever is best for you at the moment, and leave it at that. There's of course some planning involved - often because of the "no duplicate building" rule, but otherwise individual decisions are mostly about points maximizing now.
In this sense, I also wonder if the game simply has too many ways to score points - or maybe too many similarly ways to score a similar amount of points. There's no difference between filling a three spot area for knowledge or building - they're both worth the same, plus or minus any specific knowledge tile you've got. Ditto three boats, or three mines. Mines are worthless at the end of the game, but you might pick them up because that's the best option in terms of points. The same can be said of non-point-bearing knowledge tiles in the last phase that don't affect gameplay much by the time they're picked up. In that way I find it highly unsatisfying. If, say, boats are worthless to complete but goods are worth more when you sell, then someone could presumably pursue a "boat strategy" where they take the otherwise pointless boats but then sell the goods for points. Buildings could be worth more points than knowledge, but knowledge, of course, give you bonuses in and of themselves that are valuable. As it is, everyone is essentially on the same grand strategy - complete areas and score points from them. Exactly which ones often matter relatively little, especially in games with more players.
Compared this to, say, Power Grid, I think the lack of strategic depth and the relative unimportance of decisions come through. In Power Grid, every time I lost I can think of one or two decisions that probably cost me the game - buying that powerplant that I shouldn't have bought, expanding in the wrong direction at the wrong time, etc. In CoB, after I lose a game, it's usually not very clear how I lost - certainly not from decisions taken in phases one or two. Yes, it may be obvious that my opponent blocked me from that last crucial sheep because he was ahead of me in turn order at the start of phase 5, so I should've picked up that boat first, etc, but I find it difficult to go much further back than the transition to phase 5 when looking for reasons why I lost games. The flop for tiles for the last phase also has an outsized importance, IMO, on the outcome of the game. If your opponent needs two buildings and there are four total that he could use in the flop, well, your game's over. If they all happen to be duplicates and the duplicate-ok knowledge tile never showed up in the game, well, you're in luck. Positioning yourself well for the opening of phase 5 is probably the only thing that I find to be truly strategically important in this game (again, a strategic point that I find less important in 3 and especially 4 player games). Everything else is just fodder.
So the tl;dr is that I think the game is best at two players - it can be quite tactical and individual decisions matter. With four players it's more of a point salad where you just try to score points as best you can. There's also a lot of downtime with more players. I think it may be interesting to try rotating so everyone play one die first, then go around for the second. It may also be interesting to change scoring rules for different colors, although that probably requires too much testing to be implemented without imbalance.
