LogFAQs > #896949498

52. 7 Wonders
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/68448/7-wonders

Genre/mechanics: Card-drafting, tableau-building
Rules complexity: 6/10
Game length: 30-45 minutes
Player count: 3-7
Experience: 5-10 plays with 5-7 players
First played: 2015

7 Wonders is a drafting game in which you take a hand of cards, choose one to play, and then pass the rest. The cards you play have costs in coin and resources (which you must be able to pay, or else trash the card for money) and benefits (victory points, coin, resources). You get dealt a fresh set of cards three times through the game, after which you score based on your tableau of cards played.

Experience - My first play of 7 Wonders was brutal. So brutal. It was my first eurogame outside of Catan (which I'd learned years earlier), and the number of rules and symbols was absolutely obscene. (Science still confuses me!) I felt way behind and had no idea what to do, and the passive-aggressive interaction felt... passive-aggressive and weird. I literally didn't have any idea what was happening across the table from me. Oh, and the game ended with an anticlimactic, solo-ish addition exercise.

I've played it a few times since, and it's almost bizarre looking back at those initial experiences. Decoding symbols still takes effort, but the idea of "this card costs what's printed in the upper left corner, and *usually* that will illustrate a type of resource" has become second nature to me. Now I look at the game not really as a deep thought game, but still as something nice that plays a lot of players, lets you dig a little bit and feel accomplished, and goes very quickly. And the fact is, I no longer even give a shit about what someone else across the table does - I'm just way more comfortable with "multiplayer solitaire" and point salads now (though 7W of course offers some interaction).

Design - I've covered most of the biggest draws of 7W already. Should give a few bonus points for the wonder system - which very slightly distinguishes player mats from one another; the trash mechanism (which always gives you a minimum victory point threshold each card should try to match) and the way military works (you oppose only your neighbors, but a player who loses military loses less than the winner gains).

Future - Not sure how much this will hit the table as the main person who owns it moved. But it might be a useful game to have in my collection to fill that 5-7 player count zone when we're not looking for a party game.

Bonus question - Which game for you had a steep learning curve that was mostly related to your entry-point in the hobby?

Hint for #51 - I wanna go on vacation.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness