One of the most ubiquitous games during the early years of my board game journey was the Wizards of the Coast title, Lords of Waterdeep. You can think of it like a crossover offering. Many role-playing gamers were interested in what the burgeoning board gaming scene was all about by way of playing a game with a familiar fantasy city/quest/management theme. It was also one of those games that broke through from being simply just another board game to an iconic accomplishment of simplicity and player engagement. That kind of magic is hard to replicate these days.
In the board game landscape now, we are possibly at maximum loadout of player engagement, mechanical efficiency, and a sweet spot of playtime. Even though you will always have players who prefer longer or shorter, more or less interactive, and lighter or more complex, there is such a wide range of games to select from these days that gamers often have enough titles that they could be playing a new game every day and never have enough time to replay some of what they once loved.
So when a new offering bears the Dungeons & Dragons theme with optimization or indirect conflict mechanisms, this reviewer takes notice. It’s still not that common for D&D to slide into CATAN territory, and my formative years of late night fantasy adventuring still elucidates a raised eyebrow when that D&D label shows up on a square box made for Kallax. So, is Builders of Baldur’s Gate the next Lords of Waterdeep? Well, it is meant for 2-4 players with a playtime of 90 minutes. But, as far as being a hit, we need to delve deeper.
Gameplay Overview:
Overall, the game structure here is delightfully simple. Each player in clockwise order takes a turn, and this continues until the game end condition is triggered and each player takes a final turn. On every turn, a player has three choices:
- Build a building
- Place a worker
- Collect income from existing buildings
This is pretty easy to explain, but there are some details that will crop up in the process to trip players up.
First, when building a building, the player taking the action will need to choose one of the building cards in their hand (a random deal from the beginning of the game) to be the new structure. In addition, the player may not just build anywhere; they must choose one of the available plot markers (these come out randomly from a bag) to be the location where the building is located.
Next, the player pays the coin cost of the building and places a cube of their color on the plot with a building tile matching their card. Now, if the plot the player just built on has any workers at its special locations (worker placement spots to the side of the map), those workers are returned to their owning players. In addition, any other player owning a building connected to the new building gains some benefit or bonus.
Finally, the active player draws a new plot marker from the bag, and that is a new location on which a future building may be built. At any one time, there are eight of these on the board. To add to this, players will often want a variety of locations, which are divided into city districts, to be available since this mechanism also drives the main semi-cooperative component of the game.
As the plot markers are drawn from the bag and buildings are built, these markers are also feeding a track for each district that heralds when the city will be attacked (it’s not clear who is attacking or for what purpose). As soon as a track fills up, the players resolve the attack on the relevant district. The attack strength is determined by a certain value on the track, and the defense of the district is determined by how many defensive buildings the players have built there.
If the district is defended, players receive points. However, if the attack is successful, the cost of performing actions at the off-map locations increases, and any player who did not aid the defense of the district by building defensive buildings now has their ownership of their buildings removed. This is also slightly unintuitive since they may still use the cards they selected when building the buildings.
As for the second action players may take on their turn, they may place their one and only worker on one of the worker placement locations off to the side of the map. For these, there are nine districts to take an action, and for each, the player may increase the power of the action by paying a favor token.
When a player places their worker on the space, they immediately perform the action, and their token is now locked on that space until one of two things happens. Either the player takes a Collect Income action, which returns their worker, or another player chooses to take the action and kicks out the existing worker. Most of the actions for these worker placement spaces are straightforward, gaining resources or movement on one of the three faction tracks (oh yeah, there are more tracks). However, certain very important action spaces are the main means for a player to build defensive buildings to protect against attacks.
Now the final action a player may take on their turn is to Collect Income. Players will see that the building cards in front of them have a cost in coins for building the building on the top half and a Collect Income effect on the bottom half, often with a cost in “Supplies” or other resources. Players may activate their HQ card, giving a nominal amount of Coins and 1 Supply. Afterwards, they will want to activate any cards they can by paying the card’s activation cost or simply turning it sideways to show they are using it. Most effects on these cards are a resource conversion of Supplies to some other resource.
Once the final plot location marker is drawn from the bag, each player gets a final turn, and the players count up points from their position on the Faction Tracks, the longest chain of buildings they have, how many districts they have built in, and a conversion for their remaining resources into points.
Game Experience:
As much as the D&D fan inside this reviewer WANTS this game to be solid, it’s got underlying scars. They’ll show up frequently and without much probing, so much so that they cry out for someone to just come and heal them. And these issues ARE fixable. Builders of Baldur’s Gate has a lot going for it, but the glamour it displays is noticeably undercut by the inadequacies.
The first thing many players will see is that the board, as a map of Baldur’s Gate, really starts to fill up with interesting locations to build, and players get excited to get their own structures on the board. The feeling of communal city building is there with each player hoping to optimize and capitalize on adjacency to other locations. The 3D components for city gates and fortresses create a fun model of a miniature city as the game progresses, an instant eye-catcher.
Likewise, as locations are built and the attack track for a district starts to fill up, player tension also rises, with players anxious to get certain structures built lest they lose buildings during an attack. And the punishment for that event is a serious cost in points. Depending on how players have chained their building locations, a disruption to one location could cost them any chance of winning.
And that’s really where the negatives start to come into the picture. In order to pull off the scoring requirements, players do need to have more control over the locations they may build in. Now, even though eight locations are available at any one time, there is a distinct feeling of lack of control, with some players feeling like their strategy has been favored by a lucky location opening up at just the right time. In addition, since players will want to take advantage of the fortification locations, having resources on hand is also important, as well as having your worker available to place in the worker placement spots dedicated to those.
Unfortunately, it’s more common to make your worker available again from a Collect Income action than from having the worker kicked out. In general, the mechanism of worker placement is dependent on the availability of actions (what range of actions are available to a player at the time of placement) and the cost of those actions. Many of the free actions at these locations still feel underpowered, and the additional cost of locking your worker makes it half again as valuable. With other players kicking each other out, this “sounds” like workers will return frequently, but it really depends on the group dynamic and assumptions of who the leading player is. Overall, it makes some games extremely dynamic and others slow and plodding.
All in all, the combination of these two negatives above makes the game feel much more tactical than strategic, and that really should not be the case in a game like this. City-building games can flourish with the right player motivation and objectives, but there is too much randomness and action speed bumps to make players feel like they can pivot their strategy. It becomes a “build and hope other players do what I need” formula.
Finally, with regard to income, players have a limited ability to build combos with building income effects. Players who are able to gain buildings that produce supplies or favors early will do much better than those without. This feeling of a random distribution of building abilities makes the game feel like a struggle uphill, with some players chaotically favored with the right buildings that provide just the right combos needed for success.
Final Thoughts:
Dungeons and Dragons: Builders of Baldur’s Gate looks good on the table. Its main mechanisms are engaging tactically. But the shine dims when trying to accomplish tasks in the game without a random element throwing your plan in the trash. For players who don’t mind a little bit of that chaos, there’s a decent game here. For fans of traditional Eurogames, which rely on a low-luck formula, it will be more emotionally challenging.
Final Score: 2.5 Stars – If you’re keen on the aesthetics while ignoring randomness and some imbalance, you CAN build this city with rocks and trolls. The game doesn’t actually feature rocks or trolls, it just seemed like an appropriate line for this game.
Hits:
• Great look of a 3D map when the game is complete
• Semi-coop nature of district defense is engaging
Misses:
• Randomness with gaining building abilities
• Imbalance of building card abilities
• Difficulty with placing buildings in optimal locations
Source: Board Game Quest
