LogFAQs > #932742332

95. 7 Wonders (2010)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Card-drafting, tableau-building, civilization-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 30-50 minutes
Experience: 4-6 plays (2015-2018) with 5-7 players
Previous ranks: 16/100 (2016), 52/80 (2018)

Summary - 7 Wonders is a drafting game split over three ages. Each card you draft goes onto your tableau or into building Wonders specific to each player. Cards generally do one of the following: produces resources for building future cards; grant endgame victory points; or boost military strength (which are indirectly converted to victory points).

Design - Icons everywhere. Tons of different card types. Disconnected mechanisms. Variable player boards. While 7 Wonders is often touted as a gateway game, that's been anything but my experience.

That said, in my plays, the game hasn't felt same-y - each turn is filled with decisions, and because of the variety of ways to score (especially those Age 3 purple cards), it's very satisfying - much more so than Sushi Go, for instance. The resource system is quite clever; I love that you don't need chits or cubes to keep track of them, because you get to spend what you can produce on each turn and there's no storage. Also appreciate the coin mechanic by which you can buy resources from neighbors and the ability to dump cards productively into your wonders.

Experience - This was arguably the first game I played as "part of The Hobby" (TM), which has both ups and downs. I discussed in TTR how that game was the followup game session to a first game session. 7 Wonders was played in that first session, and it was the only eurogame we played that day. I remember this feeling of blankness in my mind as everyone silently looked at their boards and occasionally at others' as they struggled to make decisions, while I struggled just to make sense of anything, overwhelmed with cards but confused how I was supposed to keep track of everyone's board states.

Turns out, I now don't particularly mind multiplayer solitaire at all, especially if action is simultaneous. I also like eurogames now and am not particularly intimidated by symbology (of which 7W still has quite a fair amount). Playing this game a second time was another of my early eurogame wins, and it's probably responsible for how confusingly high this game was in my 2016 rankings. It probably belongs a bit higher than 95, but my ranking now is more a mix of the first mind-numbing play with the subsequent highs and "pleasant" plays.

Future - I know some people own 7W, but I'm not sure if there's a copy in my local group - which should tell you how regularly I see it played. I don't think it has a ton of room to grow on me personally, but becoming a consistent go-to game could put 7W higher.
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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