Orléans is bag building in France.
People are just tokens.
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.
So yeah, A bag-building game… If you don’t know what a bag-building game is it’s basically a deck-building game where the items you’re drawing didn’t have enough information on them to warrant a card. Either that or they don’t want to be known as a ‘Deck Building Game‘.
In this case, it seems that your ‘deck’ or bag doesn’t have a discard pile so it saves shuffling your deck every round.
Orléans Quick Summary
You draw people tokens to place them to get more people tokens to move up on tracks to get things or move around a map to collect resources and build stuff.
At the beginning of a round, you flip a token face up to show the event that will activate at the end of the round.
Then you draw tokens from your bag.
This is the board you place your people tokens on…
You need variety to place the tokens in the different buildings in order to take the action on that space. If you fill a space you put the tokens back in your bag and take the action. You go around the table taking one action each until everyone passes.
Areas
The brown area lets you move up on a track to gain tokens that cover one of the spaces on the above board permanently. The other space lets you move to another board that for some reason I didn’t take a picture of 🙂
The green area on the above board lets you gain new people tokens. You also move up a track for the relevant person. (In the below image)
The Yellow area at the top lets you move and build on a map (in the below image)
The tracks on the left give you a bonus as you move up them when you gain a person token of that type.
The map on the right is where you move around. Moving down roads of rivers, collecting tokens as you move. You can also build on the space where you are.
This lasts 18 rounds.
At the end of the game, the player who has built the most Trading Stations gets a bonus.
You get victory points for Coins, Wool, Wine, Cheese, Grain, Trading Stations and Citizen tiles. There are other scoring based on your position on the tracks.
Orléans Summary
This is a GOOD game, but it’s only good. There are a lot of neat things all working together and there is plenty to think about.
But, while I would be willing to give this another go, it kept reminding me of Concordia which I like a lot more.
Jesta ThaRogue