Troyes contains dice rolling and worker placement.
I’d never played a game like this before so what would I think?
In Troyes, recreate four centuries of history of this famous city of the Champagne region of France. Each player manages their segment of the population (represented by a horde of dice) and their hand of cards, which represent the three primary domains of the city: religious, military, and civil. Players can also offer cash to their opponents’ populace in order to get a little moonlighting out of them—anything for more fame!
This is a very deep game so I’m not going into much detail, even less than I normally do in these mini-reviews.
A very brief look at Gameplay
You place your workers in a building to gain a die of that colour.
Then, you roll the dice and put them into your section on the board.
You then activate buildings using your dice or buying dice from other people and make them:
- work on the cathedral
- combat misfortune
- bustle about the city
- and other such tasks that are below your family’s stature
The buildings out in play are random and will differ each game, as will your own personal goal.
This was a deep-thinky game that I would be interested in playing again. It did take me a while to get my head around it so going into it a second time knowing what I’m doing may help me improve my terrible, terrible score 🙂
Troyes Update 22/05/2018
I like Troyes but a lack of availability for the longest time made it difficult to play again. It was eventually reprinted so now there is an abundance of copies of the game around as well as the expansion.
It would be interesting to revisit this game a few years later as at the time it was by far the heaviest game I had ever played. I wonder how much my experience of playing other games would affect that.
Dice placement is one of my favourite mechanisms too with games like Bora Bora among my favourites so that’s more incentive to play this again. Although it’s not strictly a dice placement game, more action selection with dice… If you think that’s different?
Jesta ThaRogue