LogFAQs > #934066392

40. Orleans (2015)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Point salad, deck-building, point-to-point movement
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5
Game length: 75-105 minutes
Experience: 2 plays with 3, 4 players (2015, 2019)
Previous ranks: 48/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Set in medieval France, Orleans is a bag-building game played over eighteen rounds. Players pull a number of discs out of their bag. The discs represent various worker types that can be assigned to perform tasks on the player's board, but multiple workers are needed for each action. Actions can include moving a wagon around a board (to pick up goods for VP), getting more workers (which give bonuses), and a few other ways to gain VP.

Experience - Perhaps the most overrated game by experience on my list - I've only played Orleans twice, and those two plays were separated by over four years. The first play was one of my earlier heavy euros, and one of the ones I was learning and getting a good feel for. During my second play, four years later, I was no longer overwhelmed with all the options and was better able to see how to play the game.

Design - The most unique part about Orleans is the bag-building mechanic. It's pretty physically satisfying to shuffle your bag and pull out pieces and assign them onto the board. The actual mechanics of assignment are pretty cool too - every base action requires at least two workers to activate, and you have to decide whether to use your workers to activate "an action, any action" or to leave them out on your board until next round, when you've drawn the complementary pieces.

Part of what makes the game enjoyable is that, once you've grasped the decision space, there is a lot to do. I haven't played it enough to determine how "competitive" this gets, but mechanically it feels really good, because virtually everything you do benefits you in layered ways.

Take gaining workers. Getting a different set of workers is a strategic move because it allows you to specialize in different actions. However, there are further, immediate benefits as well: taking the white farmers, for example, moves you up on the farmer track, and sometimes it'll let you take goods, which are inherently worth victory points. Being high up on the farmer track gives you a trickle of VP each turn, while being low on it means you might lose VP. Meanwhile, taking the knights lets you get pieces required for moving, plus it upgrades your ability to draw from your bag, which translate to more actions overall.

Speaking of movement - when you push your little guy around a map (either by land or by sea), you reach new cities. You can an immediate VP bonus if you pick up a good on that track, and then on a subsequent action you can build a building if the city is unoccupied. The reward of building a building is - you guessed it - more VP. The game isn't really played on the map, and mainly it adds time to the setup, but... it feels good and satisfying as an option.

And of course there's sending your workers away to the temple. This is the game's only controlled culling mechanism. Shockingly, it also can result in gaining VP.

Orleans's interaction is extremely indirect and usually not particularly cutthroat. The map can empty quickly if people run through it and seize all the open spaces, and there's some finesse in timing when you go to the temple. I lost my last game because player 1 went to the temple, which perfectly set up player 2 to go and gain a special bonus. That left me (player 3) unable to get as great of a bonus. Then there's competition over being first to certain spots, or being at the top of the farmer's track, or being first to grab the tableau.

But overall, the game can be very much fixated on your own board - not that it's necessarily a bad thing. Unlike, say, Agricola, Orleans is relaxed and feels more point-salad-y. Even if you're not super-experienced, you'll usually feel good after taking a move, even if it wasn't optimal. Contrast Agricola, where even if you took an optimal move, you still might feel like it wasn't enough, and someone else definitely is mad at you for taking that move.

Future - I definitely want to play more of Orleans. Time will tell if it's a little "too" balanced, i.e. moves are so similarly valuable that basically anyone playing at least a baseline level of competence will score very close together. Nonetheless, close finishes are fun, and gaining VP is fun, and drawing from a bag is fun. Until Orleans gives me a bad experience (or fades more from memory, as it has before), that's good for me.
---

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