Never On Sunday

I got an exposure to the board game 7 Wonders last night. Players represent the home cities of the seven ancient wonders of the world and try to rack up the most victory points by the end of the game. Building your wonder can play a big role in this, but doesn’t strictly have to; you can earn plenty of VPs with smaller civic projects, accumulating “technology,” and collecting larger armies than your neighbors for bloodless battles. It’s a pretty standard “German”-style game, with high quality components, a theme of victory by construction, a system by which almost anything you do is at least potentially worth victory points, a tension between cards that score points and cards required to build them…all familiar elements. At the heart of the turn structure lies one unusual mechanic: players’ actions consist of playing one card every turn from their diminishing hands, and all unused cards are passed to the left for the next turn, so you rarely know what you’ll get next and will often want to play a card simply to keep it out of the next player’s hands.

Though interesting, that hand-passing mechanic is not enough to make 7 Wonders stand out from the crowd. What really deserves comment is the scale of the game as an activity (as opposed to the scale of the game’s theme).

It’s fast. With players familiar with the rules, I expect you could whip through a game in about half an hour.

It can handle 2 to 7 players. Effectively. The number of players affects the feel of the game: with few players, you can hope to see a card you pass come back around, and because many functions depend on what your immediate neighbors to the left and right have done, many players means you’ll be largely ignoring half the table. The number of players does not, however, affect the play time much, because you take about the same number of turns and everyone plays simultaneously. Also, because everyone plays simultaneously, you don’t suffer a lot of down time between turns, even with many players. The game remains entirely workable with wildly different numbers of players, which is fairly rare among board games.

It strikes a good, though not remarkable, balance between accessibility and depth. Rather on the light side, I’m afraid, but not entirely vacuous. The strategic challenge is much like Race for the Galaxy, in which you must decide early on which path to pursue and hope the cards you get support that decision, with limited ability to adapt to changing conditions.

The speed and flexibility in number of players and depth-to-simplicity balance make 7 Wonders admirably suited to fill in the odd gaps at our monthly game days. Suppose three players arrive and we expect another two in half an hour. Rather than sitting around doing nothing, or getting hip deep in a more involved game and leave the later arrivals sitting out, we can break out 7 Wonders. Suppose we’ve got six players hankering for a round of San Juan, which can accommodate no more than 5 players, or four players who hanker for it and two who hate it. We can break out 7 Wonders to keep that extra pair busy. Or suppose we’re winding down after four hours’ heavy strategizing but aren’t ready to throw in the towel, so we need something fairly light that seven people can play in the space of an hour.

We own other candidates that could fill such gaps, but not many, and not as well. Settlers of Catan and San Juan are light and quick, but inflexible in the number of players—SJ wants three or four, and Catan’s exquisite balance breaks down unless you have precisely four. Kem>Medici is more flexible, but too cutthroat for many at our table. Fluxx is more flexible yet, but far too shallow, and the play time is too unpredictable.

7 Wonders works so well at filling these gaps that it feels like the designer sat down and thought about how to make a game that would fill them, rather than taking the more typical routes where a designer starts by thinking either “I want to make a game using this clever mechanic; what other rules will make it a good game?” or “I want to make a game about this competitive environment; what rules will simulate it accurately?” People who engage in something like our monthly game day, with fluid start and stop times and an indeterminate number of players, can definitely use this. Whether 7 Wonders has the depth to maintain interest over the long term remains to be seen.