Orléans
During the medieval goings-on around Orléans, you must assemble a following of farmers, merchants, knights, monks, etc. to gain supremacy through trade, construction and science in medieval France.
In the city of Orléans and the area of the Loire, you can take trade trips to other cities to acquire coveted goods and build trading posts. You need followers and their abilities to expand your dominance by putting them to work as traders, builders, and scientists. Knights expand your scope of action and secure your mercantile expeditions. Craftsmen build trading stations and tools to facilitate work. Scholars make progress in science, and last but not least it cannot hurt to get active in monasteries since with monks on your side you are much less likely to fall prey to fate.
In Orléans, you will always want to take more actions than possible, and there are many paths to victory. The challenge is to combine all elements as best as possible with regard to your strategy.
User Reviews (3)
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I got a chance to play Orléans at a game night at a local game store this past week. Here’s what I gathered from my first play.
You’re going to get something from repeated play beyond failed tactics and refinement. The event cards that come up every turn, weal or woe, are going to be pretty much the same ones every time. If you can keep it in your head as to what is going on, you’ll know how many of each event are left.
Beyond that though, it’s about building an engine to do something, and then trimming that engine up to work as good as it can. You can do that in a couple of ways, from putting discs to the beneficial deeds board, which will get you money and maybe the little citizen tokens if you manage to fill up one of the deeds sections first. The other thing that could thin out your bag is random and hardly ever useful from what I can tell, and that’s the plague event. The problem there, is that you’re picking a worker out of the bag at random to lose.
On top of that, something I didn’t expect going in to my first game was running out of worker tokens in several different areas. In our game, it was the monks (seemingly of course) and the university, as well as the tech one. It seemed to be rather difficult to get anyone back on to the board as well, since any of the markers that go into the shared board stay there. Pretty much the only way that it comes back up is if someone dies in the plague. Apparently there’s more space in the workforce for whomever.
The other part of the game that’s interactive is the travel board. And travelling will get you goods, and you can build guild houses that go up in value depending on how far along you are on the bottom track. That bottom track affects how much the citizens are worth at the end as well
Also worth noting that the deluxe edition is what I played, and the bigger harder tokens were pretty neat. It’s too bad that they’re not going to keep that up. If you can find an edition of it out there, though, it was exceptional.
Concept
Recruit workers to acquire goods and increase your influence in medieval France by using bagbuilding and multi-worker placement as game concept.
Material
A lot of decent cardboard, the art fits the theme.
Rules
All in all, this is a simple game (yet difficult to master). Great rulebook.
Gameplay
To be honest, at first glance I thought this game was ‘meh’: overwhelming board and dull art. But the gameplay is fantastic. The bagbuilding and decisions are fun and thinky in a good way. The game plays very smooth, the first rounds are rather straight forward (yet important strategy-wise) and solitary, but the game gets more tense and even more interactive towards the end.
Negative points
The events are mostly not very harsh (although it can be hard, when the pest strikes your monk). Replayability might be an issue, although there are enough strategies to try out. The bags in the dutch version could have come in the player colors.
Conclusion
Look past the dull and overwhelming board and play this great game!
Orleans “Live Play” by GreyElephant Gaming: https://youtu.be/4X1rJ6XxU04
Was introduced to this game tonight at local Nottingham gaming club and have to say very impressed.
It looks far more complex than it really is and so can be very off putting. The subject of a historical game and lots of counters and board bits makes it look dense and kind of boring.
However the truth is far more convoluted. The game plays quickly, you can get to grips after the first game, and it has massive levels of playability. Its a very much resource management but with levels of tactical play and future planning that mean you are having to plan and think two or three moves a head and change plans quickly.
This is one to add to peoples collection.