Terrible Choices. Sometimes all of your choices will be bad. If you can suss out a particularly clever solution to your current situation, you can really benefit from it. Like any great tactical game, Artus plays like a puzzle. You see where your pieces and the nobles are at the start of your turn, and you do your best to take advantage of that.Sometimes you’ll be able to immediately leap into playing great cards, sometimes you’ll need to use one card play to set up the other, and sometimes you’ll have to tread water. That can make it a really nice change of pace and something that’ll keep you on your toes. It doesn’t fit into any of the standard categories of play and generally is quite unlike anything else.
Very Innovative. Though its game play has some precursors, Artus is quite an innovative game. Third, if you play the advanced game (which is the one that has a difficulty score of 4 instead of 2, and the only way you should play), then you also have special scoring cards that you must play and which earn you big negative points if you can’t set them up just right. Second, the king can (somewhat oddly) change among the four nobles at the table. So the whole game is about moving knights, to earn their points, and also to improve their positioning - all while also knocking back opponents’ knights who are in good positions themselves. They’re worth positive points if they’re on the king’s right hand or negative points if they’re to his sinister (left) side. Each player has 4 or 5 knights seated around a round table.
Publisher : Ravensburger (2011), out-of-printĪrtus is a game of positioning and point manipulation. The medium boxes proved that they were still publishing very interesting games from other designers.Īuthor: Wolfgang Kramer, Michael Kiesling For past articles you can read about: Ra, Chinatown, and Taj Mahal in Part One or Princes of Florence, Adel Verpflichtet, and Traders of Genoa in Part Two or Wyatt Earp, Royal Turf, and Puerto Rico in Part Three or Die Sieben Weisen, Edel, Stein & Reich, and Mammoth Hunters in Part Four or San Juan, Fifth Avenue, and Louis XIV in Part Five or Palazzo, Augsburg 1520, and Rum & Pirates in Part Six Notre Dame, In The Year of the Dragon, and Witch’s Brew in Part Seven or Macao, Alea Iacta Est, and Glen More in Part Eight.īy 20, Alea was deep in Stefan Feld land, but that was only the big box series.
This article is the eighth in a continuing series that analyzes the entire Alea line of games.