The man was very excited to bring home Legends of Andor for us
to play. So excited in fact that he went ahead and purchased the Star Shield
expansion before we’d even had a chance to play the base game. The plotlines
for Andor go something like this: the security of your kingdom relies on you
cooperatively completing quests as you move throughout the land (i.e. around
the board) and encounter creatures hell bent on invading the castle. You’ll
never be able to stop all of the creatures from invading the castle but you
must keep your eye on how many you allow through, because any more than the
maximum permitted and you lose the game immediately. Fending off the creatures
involves rolling dice to score higher than they do to defeat them (you also
roll dice on behalf of the creatures). I’m all about kings and queens and
defending noble castles so as we unpacked the game I held high hopes for the
potential levels of joy Andor would bring me.
The artwork for this game is well drawn and quite beautiful.
The board is expansive with a soft palette of colors that pulls you into the
storyline. There are a lot of game pieces of varying types and sizes that come
with this game - mostly cardboard figures to be slotted into plastic holders
for standing upright on the game board. While the pieces are also well drawn, they
are of average construction so you’ll need to keep them away from toddlers and
pets who could easily rip or destroy the components.
The game designers provide a quick start guide they instruct
you to follow for the first game in order to learn the mechanics of play. They
make it a point to ask you NOT to read the full manual until you’ve played
through the first game using the quick start guide. That made for quick setup
and getting into the game without having to pour through a half hour of
instructions to understand every nuance. Even after completing the first
scenario (which are referred to as legends) and getting into the meatier rules
book, I found the game mechanics easy to grasp and follow. A heavy euro game
this is not; play flows pretty smoothly.
While the game is easy to understand and has great theming, as
we played through the game, tackling the starting legend and then the first and
second standard legends, the low points of its mechanics design caught my
attention. It’s a cooperative game, which in and of itself is not a negative
(although I strongly prefer cooperative games layered with a bonus structure or
otherwise competitive rewarding subsystem for the individual players) but it
doesn’t have the necessary safeguards in place to discourage stronger willed
teammates from pushing their fellow players to do their bidding and effectively
using them to play solitaire. It was a constant struggle with the man as he pushed
for me to HERE or HERE or fight this creature with him instead of doing the
things I wanted to prioritize. Give me a game where we can divide and conquer
and I fight a monster and you fight a monster, over a game where we both have
to fight the same monster together to win. Please.
My other design criticism of the game is admittedly a petty
one but nonetheless it targets a visual element that really grates on my
nerves. In Andor, you have seven hours as a player to complete tasks before the
day begins again. You start on the sunrise space, i.e. 0, and each time you
take an action you advance to the next hour’s space. When you hit the 7th
hour space, it represents the end of the day and you are finished. Which means
you go back to the sunrise box (normally; there are exceptions that let you go
into overtime for an 8th hour or beyond). Below is a picture of the
time track.
You can see that there is a little arrow at the end of the 7th
hour space that curves back around to the sunrise space. In practice what this
means is that you move your token to the 7th hour space after taking
your 7th action and it is immediately the end of your day, so you
move your token back to the sunrise space. Which makes the 7th hour
space pointless. Since reaching the 7th hour ends your day, it would
make much more sense to have the arrow curve back to the sunrise box from the 6th
hour.
I will continue to play this game as well as the expansion in
order to work through all of the quests and hopefully as the man and I move
through the game we can master cooperation in addition to the game.
----------------------------
Publisher: Kosmos
Players: 2-4 (We played with 2)
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 90
minutes per Legend
Game type: Area Movement, Cooperative
Rating:
Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI:
I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this
game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to
me I would keep it.
OUI
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI
OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON:
I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if
it was given to me.
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