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Charterstone - Board Game Box Shot

Charterstone

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The prosperous Kingdom of Greengully, ruled for centuries by the Forever King, has issued a decree to its citizens to colonize the vast lands beyond its borders. In an effort to start a new village, the Forever King has selected 6 citizens for the task, each of whom has a unique set of skills they use to build their charter.

In Charterstone, a competitive legacy game scaled for 1-6 players, you construct buildings and inhabit a shared village. Building stickers are removed from cards and permanently added to your charter on the board, becoming action spaces for any player to use (kind of like Lords of Waterdeep, Caylus and Ora et Labora). Thus, a few available buildings soon grow into a bustling village with dozens of actions.

Your journey through Charterstone’s many secrets will last 12 games, but it doesn’t end there. Your completed village will be a one-of-a-kind, variable worker-placement game. Or you can purchase a completely optional recharge pack to play a second campaign.

Realistic resource tokens can be purchased for Charterstone from Top Shelf Gamer.

User Reviews (2)

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7
Old Bones
Knight
Explorer - Level 4
9
6 of 7 gamers found this helpful
“Build-it-yourself Euro kit, with instructions given in story form”

Have you seen those make-your-own-succulents-in-a-terrarium kits you can find near a bookstore cash register? Charterstone is a make-your-own-worker-placement-Euro kit. If you’ve never made a boardgame, not to worry: all the parts are provided in the box and it will step you through the process 1 game at a time.

Experience

Charterstone is focused on the game-by-game growth and evolution of the town your play group is developing over a 12-game arc. Each of you will have your own region to build up, though for most games, you’ll be able to place most of your workers in any of the locations on the board.

The main strategy of the game is to build a “mini engine” in your region that you can exploit for points—the mini engine being a cycling of locations that will give you resources that you can use for more cards or more buildings or more workers that will help you get more points.

However, the end of each game unlocks new, modified, or temporarily suspended rules for the next game, which means the strategy you used this game may no longer work in future games.

Adaptation is the key to survival in the evolution of your charter.

If you don’t enjoy surprises and constantly shifting rules and goals, this isn’t the game for you.

The main fun here is in revealing new cards and components in mystery boxes, hearing the on-going story of the Forever King and what he wants from your play group, and getting to name new characters and locations on the board and tracking your progress.

There will be a winner at the end of the 12 games, but if you care about that too much, you’ll not likely enjoy the game as much as those who are playing to be part of the ride.
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Keywords

Campaign: Your progress in building your village is charted over 12 games and cumulative successes are used to determine the Campaign winner.

Legacy: You will be constantly adding to and changing the board, adding cards and other components, writing in names, sometimes destroying cards, leaving you with a unique game at the end that can be played as a stand-alone game.

Worker Placement: Players use a limited number of workers to take actions at locations on the board. When you’ve run out of workers to place, you must use a turn to take them all back, or hope another player bumps you from your spot to free that worker.

Engine Building: To a small degree, players are trying their best to add buildings to their regions that will help them generate points as efficiently as possible.

Story Told: The campaign’s appeal is the overarching story of the Forever King and executing the charter of building the village.
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What Works
• Surprises with opening Crates and rules modifications for next game.
• Campaign mode with slight shifts in ease or anxiety about rule change — every game plays differently and prevents runaway leader if players are forced to change tactics and strategies from game to game.
• Thrill of creating your unique Charter village and characters.
• Components are top notch and aesthetically and graphically beautiful, as one expects from Stonemaier Games.

What Doesn’t Work
• Bad buildings in your Charter makes it difficult to chain an efficient engine, making it difficult to catch up with players with great output of resources and/or other benefits; there’s no recovery from this — luck of getting building cards when they come up is difficult to mitigate if you don’t have things already set up (especially in the way of buildings in your charter) to take advantage of those at any turn.
• Lopsided building of Charters by the end of the game makes the board largely unplayable for stand-alone games.
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Buy If
• You can find 1 to 5 other people to commit to a regular game to play through all 12 episodes of the campaign.
• You want to create a custom worker placement Euro boardgame that you will continue to play after the campaign ends, even if it’s somewhat lopsided.

Play If
• The thrill of exploration and surprises excites you more than other types of game fun (such as exploring strategy, winning).
• You don’t mind playing sub-optimally from time to time and enjoy the challenge of adapting your strategy based on game-to-game rule changes and overall legacy changes.
• Your motto is “It’s about the journey, not the destination.”

Skip If
• You highly desire balance and low luck.
• You abhor runaway leaders or runaway engines.
• You really care about skill-based winning.
• You expect the connecting story to blow you away.

 
Player Avatar
1
9
6 of 7 gamers found this helpful
“Great intro to Legacy Gaming”

It’s colorful, has good components, is fun to play, and only slightly devious. Charterstone offers you 12 fun 60-minute gaming sessions that are story driven and offers many big-time game changing opportunities to steer the direction of play. The game rules and features unfold as you advance on giving you time to learn the game slowly. Plus at the end of the 12-story missions you get a permanent unique to your game session Charterstone.

My Scores:
Replay Value – 4 Stars – It’s a Legacy game, so normally this score is the worst, but with the huge variety of play styles and story choices, this would be a lot more fun to replay than most and if not all other legacy games.

Components – 4 – Metal coins, solid cardboard, colorful and fun artwork give Charterstone high marks for components quality.

Easy to Learn – 3 – Not a dictionary rule book like found in most legacy games, which is good. We had some issues understanding when things happened and did have to reference it many times as new mechanics are revealed. We did go online to get some clarification on rules a few times. This is a normal thing for my group when we play a legacy game.
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