Symphony No. 9 First Impressions

In Symphony No. 9 you’ll be investing in Musicians and hoping their music gets played.

But don’t appear to be too well off or too stingy, no one likes that.

In Symphony No. 9, players are the rich nobles of the 18th century. You will be the patron to various different musicians, and in return, you will gain ownership to their works.

Symphony No. 9 Summary

This an area control game mixed with a bit of set collection. Looking at my collection I can see 3 games that fit this description.

Rising Sun is the first. You’re trying to control warring Provinces in order to collect the token for that Province. Both mechanisms work in their own way but the base level of both games boils down to just that.

Sticking with CMON, the next game is Ethnos. Here you’re collecting sets of cards to try and control Regions. It’s obviously much different as with Rising Sun but at its core, you’re basically doing the same thing.

The 3rd is Five Tribes which is much more different.

Isn’t it good to have 4 games that pretty much have the same core mechanisms yet play so differently? 🙂

The area control in Symphony No. 9 is straightforward. There is a huge advantage to going last obviously but there is balance. During setup, the first and last players start with fewer cubes and the start player marker goes counter-clockwise.

Working the area control into the set collection part for end-game scoring is a headache. You need to gain the composer tokens, you have to. But you can’t just get any old token, that’s not good enough. Each has randomly assigned scoring that will require you have all different tokens to score in different ways.

All this will fighting over 6 Composers with 3 other players where the number required to ‘win’ is very low. It’s tight.

Then there is the bidding and concert part which s good fun. Suddenly all the players come together and try and help each other. I love how that works.

Jesta ThaRogue