Baghdad: The City of Peace

Neat new game that uses "action" cards in a different way. Loads of planning in the game, which is not my favorite, but thankfully, there are tons of paths to victory, so I never felt like my hopes were dashed. Tons of combo-ing to be had!

Played aprototype (with final rules, as far as I understand) during Essen Spiel 2024.

The game is based on a card mechanic, where you play one card and trigger one of its actions, and it stays “in play” for three turns, so its action icons will count even for the next two cards played. The mechanic works and is quite elegant, but seems a bit underdeveloped: there’s no sense of progression, and basically you do the same for the whole game. You don’t even “build your deck”: after the card leaves your play area, it’s gone forever (you simply draft another after you play one).

What I was most skeptical about is the graphic design and artwork (but it was a prototype, so hopefully it can be somewhat improved): while definitely ergonomic and readable, it was very bland and not evocative of the setting.

I left with a sour taste and definitely unimpressed by the game, probably because of the mismatch between what I was expecting from this designer duo and what the gameplay had to offer: it’s way simpler than what I would expect from a Mangone/Lopiano design (I’d say this falls in the “family+” category).

UPCOMING

This game uses a mechanism similar to Viscounts, where you have a conveyor belt of cards, except the bonuses trigger only when the card falls off, and you use each card once. I quite enjoy the clever mechanisms in it, how you want to take and play cards that you can fulfill the condition for, but also that give you the action icons that you really need. It can get weird with a display of cards that give rewards for things no one has really gone for, but in that case you just take the one that helps you the most with its icons. There's a question of how important luck is in the game, as new tiles might make placements more expensive for the next player, and also sometimes the display might be full of meh or bad cards, and after you pick one the best card for you (and others) appears. I'm not extremely annoyed by this, I'm used to the luck of the display of cards, it means you have to diversify a bit. As for placements being expensive, you do have to keep some resources as a form of mitigation, plus tokens that let you move extra quadrants can help alleviate that problem as well. I had several of those in my game and it helped me go to the places I wanted skipping quadrants with really high costs or bad rewards. Looking forward to playing it again.