Introduction
Back in 2013 I was part of a board game group that used to meetup in the library once every week. They had three IKEA bags filled with games and for me it was a gold mine. The first time I went to one of this meetups I had the pleasure of trying out a game in which we all played in the same without much downtime. Using cards you build your city and it was simple yet there was so much to it that I explored later on. The game im talking about is called 7 Wonders, designed by Antoine Bauza back in 2010. Winning several major board game awards this box showed up at most board game tables for the next years to come.
The basics
At a first glance the game looks like a mess of cards, but actually it is very structured and fast. First of all, there is no text in this game. This means that as long as you can communicate verbally with the other players and someone can read the rules, then you are ready to play. The players starts with a hand of seven cards and the base for one of the available wonders of the world such as the Statue of Zeus in Olympia, or the Great Pyramid of Gizah.
The wonder you start with also comes with a starter resources, raw material such as ore, wood, clay or manufactured goods like glass or textiles. All resources you gain can be used to buy new cards, which in turn lets you play other cards that require specific resources. In the end you build chains of cards of different city structures that gives you points at the end of the game. The player with the most points win. Simple.
The good, the bad and the not so ugly
What makes this game so good is that anyone can pick this up due to its simplicity and lack of text. The cards have big pictures, clear background colors and symbols to describe the card type and effect. I have introduced this game to many people of all ages and they have all found this easy to understand, with one exception. I come back to that later.
First of all the downtime for this game is amazing. Since everybody play their turn synchronized the time to wait for another player is heavily reduced. Effects play out at the same time and everybody can handle their own cards in front of them. There are also fun references of 7 throughout the game such as maximum allowed players are 7 and the number of cards you start with in your hand is 7.
Second, I have played this game now for 10 years and even others I regularly play this with fail to find the optimal win condition. Some would say that it depends on what your neighbours are doing (You are only allowed to trade resources and engage in war with players sitting next to you), but there is more than that. You would also have to pay attention to all players to figure out what cards they more likely want and how that compete with your strategy. In the end we are always surprised about who the winner is and still to this day don’t know or don’t want to know the path of winning.
There are some minor things I have discovered over the years that bugs me. One of obvious mechanics in the game is that you can invest in your wonder by discarding a card to unlock rewards such as victory points or other unique resources. The strange thing though is that even if the game is called “7 Wonders” you don’t actually have to invest anything into your wonder, or even complete it, to win the game. Why?
Also it is very easy the more players you are or the less experience you have that suddenly somebody is saying “Why do I have one less card than everybody else?”. The result is that the game is ruined as it is very difficult to backtrack all actions and figure out what went wrong. Among my friends we saw that the most common reason was that someone didn’t wait for the others and played their card without timing with the others, so to ease this confusion we always count down “3… 2… 1… SHOW!” to make sure all players reveal their cards in the same time.
All in all its a very good game with minimal flaws and anyone can pick this up. As of $40 you can pick this up in your local board game store and recently it has also started to show up at video game stores with other popular board games. For the price and replayability I would say this is a modern classic that every board game fanatic needs for their casual play dates.