Four Taverns
2-4
12+
20+
In Four Taverns you compete against your opponents to have the best known Tavern in the land. Hire adventurers and send them out on quests. The more quests your parties complete, the more adventurers come to your tavern. However, take heed; for the other taverns will often be playing for the same quests you are. If they succeed where you fail, your adventurers and gold will be lost! Warriors, wizards, druids, alchemists, and rangers. You'll need all of them and more to win!
images © Rather Dashing Games
User Reviews (4)
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one. You have a tavern where you are hiring different adventures such as wizards, warriors, rogues, and clerics to go out into the land to complete quest to earn you prestige! Once you are able to recruit enough adventurers then you can complete the quest for gold and prestige. Does this sound anything like any other recently released game? That’s right, Lords of Waterdeep.
If Lords of Waterdeep continues to have success Wizards should consider buying this smaller publishers rights from them and remarketing and redesigning the pieces as a card game follow up to Lords of Waterdeep much like games such as Ticket to Ride.
Now the game is not at all a rip off of Lords of Waterdeep. I don’t even know which one was published first, I’m just saying they are very similar in theme. Eerily similar.
Game Play:
With Four Taverns you are drawing your resources from a deck verse worker placement. The cards you draw are mostly adventure cards with a different value on them. These are adventures that have entered your tavern that you have an opportunity to pay and send out on quest.
The quest are in a separate deck and require a certain point level from each of the four adventurer types to complete. For instance on one quest you may need a level four warrior and rogue, a level 1 cleric, and a level two warrior.
Now, if you have a level five of each in your hand then you can pay each one their gold due, which is one, and then play these cards and complete the quest. Or if you do not have them you can play them in hopes that you can complete the quest the next time around. You could keep the cards in your hand as well, but you have a card limit based on how many victory points you have.
There are a few cards in the deck that allow you to play special actions such as steal an adventurer or play adventure cards that act as two in one for their ability, but that about sums it all up.
Pros:
• The game was quick and easy to play. You could quickly play it between games and easily teach it to anyone.
• If you have a young one at home learning addition, this could be a fun game. It would not be over their head and you could use the adventurer numbers to help them learn.
Cons:
• The game is produced by a smaller game company and the components are not the best quality. The cards are a bit thin and the art did not very much appeal to me.
• There is not much to the game and it is almost too simple for me.
Overall:
I really appreciate this new company working hard to develop this game as a new startup company. At the booth for Gen Con they were dressed up in their steam punk costumes and really working hard. However, the quality of game play and the pieces just do not do it for me. The basic game play and complete random chance are a turn off for me. I would not seeing this making it to the table very often.
Four Taverns is a game with a simple premise. You play one of four competing taverns. These taverns hire adventurers to complete tasks. Completing tasks gains the tavern prestige, which increases the taverns notoriety.
In the game, adventurers are represented by cards which you draw. Each adventurer can be one of four types (with some exceptions): warrior, cleric, rogue, and wizard. These adventurers have a value assigned to them; the higher, the better. The adventures are represented by cards in the middle. Each adventure has a certain value that must be reached for each adventurer type in order to complete that adventure. Players can play over multiple turns to complete an adventure. As the player completes adventures, his or her tavern gains prestige. This allows the tavern to level up, which just means the player can hold more cards in his hand. Players replenish their hands by drawing cards at the beginning of the turn. There are other cards in the game that allow you to tamper with other players occasionally, as well as powerful multi-class adventurers that meet two requirements on each adventure card.
The game is essentially a giant card drawing game with very little strategy and a lot of luck. Players just hold cards in hand until they can complete an adventure. The player(s) who happens to get lucky enough to draw the right cards early will complete adventures first. This is where the game really becomes imbalanced; because of the mechanic that increases hand size for leveling up, it becomes easier for those players to hold cards for adventures. This means the player(s) that were lucky enough to draw the right cards early on run away with the game. I found that you could basically call the winner of the game within a few minutes of starting and be right 95% of the time.
The game has potential, but needs A LOT of work. 3/10.
If you’ve done table top fantasy roleplay you’ve probably started in a tavern. If you’ve read any fantasy novels you remember the inns and innkeepers, whether it is Otik’s Inn of the Last Home from Dragonlance or Barliman Butterburr’s Prancing Pony from Lord of the Rings. The Inn is essential to an adventurer even if you do nothing more there than drink ale, smoke pipeweek, eat spiced potatoes and meet your companions.
Turns out, according to Four Taverns anyway, that Innkeepers are a rather competitive lot and they work against rival taverns to attract the best adventurers, have their patron fulfill the best quests and gain the most re known.
The game is straight forward. There are three piles of quests in the middle of the table that every one of the inns is trying to convince their patrons to go complete. The quests have requirements listed on them in the form of a color representing a class and a number on that color representing the number of levels that character class needs to be to fulfill that requirement of the quest.
Your hand if filled with adventurers and special cards. You pay a little gold out of your till to encourage your adventurer to go on a particular quest, when you have all the requirements for that quest fulfilled, you get the money and renown and can begin to level up your tavern (meaning larger hand size). Should your opponents complete it first you lose both your adventurer and your money.
This is a quick game 25-45 minutes with 4 players.
I played this at Gen Con, it is a card based game and I really enjoyed it. Truth be told I would like to play it more to really “get” it’s replayability. You play competing Innkeepers, trying to get the adventuring party to come to your tavern and spend their loot. There are some “screw with the other players” type cards but I think it would benefit from some more humor ala Red Dragon Inn. That said I still liked it and I think I would like it more if I did more than just demo it. I know this review doesn’t sound particularly helpful but I guess what I’m saying is that I liked it but might like it more if I played it more. However, there is a chance I might not? I think the game is missing some kind of punch to move it from good to great.