Date: 10th April 2015
Game played: Staufer Dynasty, The ( Z-Man Games ) BGG Id: 166226

A smaller turnout this week meant there was just one table of four players and we started with a game I've been itching to play, The Staufer Dynasty. And it didn't disappoint. It felt like a Stefan Feld game although it was actually designed by Andreas Steding. Played over five rounds, it is a worker placement / area control game, where each of your workers has just two choices: Perform a supply action to get envoys and nobles into your court; or perform a Placement action to add an envoy or noble to one of the six regions. However, this simple premise hides some tough decisions that the player has to make. Firstly, as well as the dude you want to place in a region, you need to spend more envoys/nobles to travel to that region and pay the cost of occupying the space so it may well cost several dudes to get to where I want to be and, of course, your supply of envoys/nobles is limited so you need to balance placement with getting more characters through the supply. However, each region space and each supply space also gets you a treasure chest, which give a variety of benefits and it is these that add a lot of the strategic analysis to the game. This is probably not a game for people with severe analysis paralysis. Once everyone's workers have done their actions, there is a scoring of one or two regions followed by a clean-up where characters used to help you score go back to the provinces (so you need to recruit them again through the supply action), and some of those you spent to pay for your placement get returned to your court. After five rounds, there are some end-game bonus objectives that get scored and the person with most VPs wins.

We all thoroughly enjoyed this and it was great that we all followed different approaches to getting points. Nige wasn't particularly interested in gaining big points from the region scoring as he was concentrating on his end-game objectives, whereas my objectives seemed less important so I was going for region scoring. Mark G was picking up chests that gave him more points at game-end the more he collected. As it turned out, I had a healthy lead going into the end game scoring but Nige doubled his score through those end-game bonuses and eased his way past me for the win. Excellent game and the modular set-up means that every game will give you different things to think about.

 
Player
Rating
Score
Position
Winner
Nige
8
105
1
Garry
9
95
2
Felix
8
76
3
Mark G
8
69
4

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