Argent: The Consortium Review

Argent: The Consortium is the newest game from Level 99 Games. It was wildly successful on Kickstarter back in January, funding over 450%. In Argent, players use their wizards to earn enough votes from the consortium of a university in order to become the new chancellor.

Argent is primarily a worker placement game, but there are elements of card drafting, set collection, and special player powers also integrated as well. 

One of the best things about Argent is that there are 5 different kinds or workers (wizards) that each have a different ability either before or after they are placed. The red wizards, for instance, have the ability to knock other wizards off of placement spots, take the spot for themselves, and send the injured wizard to the infirmary.

Players' turns consist of taking a single action, which can consist of placing a wizard, playing a card, casting a spell, or passing. Worker spaces don't trigger until the end of the round. Once the round ends, the tiles that comprise the board trigger one after the other. All tiles have several spaces for wizards, and while the best ones are at the top of the tile and trigger first at the end of each round, these spots also require a badge - of which players only start with one.

There are three types of cards in the game. Spell cards, which players will acquire and then be able to activate once per round for a special ability, supporter cards, which will sometimes grant a special ability, and vault cards, which are a mix - treasures stay in play and can be activated once per round and consumables are played and discarded.

As I mentioned above, the goal of the game is to attract the most votes from the members of the consortium. The trick here is that the members of the consortium all start the game face down and secret. Players have to use their wizards to earn marks in order to gain information about what each voter is looking for - some will vote for the player with the most supporters from a certain school of magic or the player with the most money at the end of the game, etc.

The game ends after 5 rounds. End the end of the fifth round, the consortium cards are revealed, and rewarded to whoever meets the voters criteria. 

Argent: The Consortium does a lot of things differently from many worker placement games. First is the fact that players' turns do not always involve placing a worker. Adding card play into the mix changes the normal prioritization of worker placement games - not only do players need to decide which spots they need to take first, they also need to time snatching up those spots with resources or abilities they might need by taking an entire turn to play a card.

One thing that fell a little short for me is the hidden scoring conditions. Before my first couple plays, I was really excited about this concept. I really liked acquired marks so that I could get information about final scoring that my opponents didn't have and give me a direction to go in. The problem I have with this part of the game is two fold. First, there are 12 consortium votes available each round - but it was very rare in any of my playthroughs to see any players who had not placed out all or nearly all of their marks. The problem is that there are so many voters available that the variation of which voters are available each game is not very big. For the most part, players will want to try to get the most of everything, and need to find the consortium voters who are looking for specific color spells and supporters. I guess since my expectations for this mechanism were so high, I got to be a little let down after the fifth time I marked the "most gold" voter - not super exciting.

Another thing that I didn't love about Argent is the feeling that, even though the game adds a lot of really interesting twists to the worker placement genre, at its core, Argent's basic gameplay of "place a wizard, get resources," is still pretty stock worker placement. The different wizard's special powers didn't come into play nearly as often as I would have liked, and their abilities are not super exciting anyway.

Although those two factors didn't hit for me, I did have a great time playing Argent. The theme is great, and the twists the gameplay does offer are fun to play around with.

In addition, one of my favorite mechanical twists Argent throws in is the end of round trigger. In each game, there are a number of Bell Tower cards which grant a one-time bonus. Players can take one of these as their entire turn, but once the last card is taken, the round ends immediately. So players also share control over how long each round will last. Do you take the Bell Tower card with the resource you really need before the resolution phase? It's the second-to-last one there...will you have enough turns before the last one is taken to get everything done you need to get done?

Argent: The Consortium isn't going to set the worker placement genre on fire, but it is a very solid game, and one that I would recommend checking out! 7.5/10.

Jim would like to thank Level 99 Games for providing him with a review copy of Argent: The Consortium.

The Big Fat Tomato Game Review

Let's start this review off by being clear about something - it's the game that is big and fat in The Big Fat Tomato Game, not the tomatoes. I think...

Either way, in the Big Fat Tomato Game, each player is a tomato farmer attempting to harvest (and stockpile) the most tomatoes.  Unfortunately, your opponents are sneaky jerks and might send things at you like Dang Varmints!  Each turn is fairly straightforward - you draw back up to five cards and then you can play a green card (these help you).  If, after playing a green card there are still bad things in front of you, then their negative effects go into play.  Next, you roll dice and add that many tomatoes to your harvest (in the cool plastic basket), and you can play one red (evil) card on one of your opponents (such as the jerk that played his hateful card on you).  Finally, you can discard unwanted cards (like the 4th copy of a card that you're tired of looking at).  Also, at any time during your turn, you can attempt to "Stockpile" the tomatoes in your harvest.  In order to do this, you have to guess that you have at least 20 tomatoes in your harvest - if you're correct, then you get to put them all in your stockpile (random pile of tomatoes in front of you - they are the only tomatoes worth points at the end).  But, if you're wrong, then you lose all of the tomatoes in your harvest!  Play continues until the Market Stand card is drawn - at which point the tomato farmer with the largest bounty in his stockpile is the winner!  (And gets to throw tomatoes at his opponents.  Wait - I think you're supposed to do that at comedians.  Or was it writers.  Since I'm currently writing, I'm going to hope it's comedians.)

My harvest never looked like this.

The first pro for the Big Fat Tomato Game (which is definitely not the name - I'm going to get tired of typing that really quickly) is the fuzzy tomatoes.  Keep in mind, this is a kids game.  And kids like neat fuzzy things in their games.  And so do adults.  (Adults also like cool looking sculpted plastic pieces in the shape of elves, but this game went with the fuzzy stuff.)  It gives the game both a neat "feel" (awesome pun) and gives it a unique tactile experience that you don't often find in board games.

The next thing that I like about the tomato game is that it is a light-weight "take that" game.  Honestly, it reminds me a lot of a less frustrating version of Mille Bornes.  My wife loves Mille Bornes, but I inevitably run out of gas in the first third of a race and never manage to find a gas station.  In the tomato game, however, there is nothing that outright prevents you from gaining tomatoes.  Some cards reduce your harvest by a die roll, others only allow you to roll a single die, and some even take tomatoes out of your stockpile.  However, none of these cards are devastating enough that you really grow irate if someone plays one of them against you.  Plus, there are enough different cards to get rid of each negative that none of them will really cripple a player.

The third pro that I will mention for the tomato game is that it is incredibly accessible.  It could be played with kids as well as adults and, though adults may not want to play it all the time, I think that it can be enjoyed by either age group.  It's just a nice, lightweight, game with good natured attacking.  (If you're curious about "good natured" attacking, it's the kind of attacking that doesn't cause the player to want to attack you in real life after the game is over.)  In the games that I've played, the game was fun, but was light enough that we were able to enjoy the company of the other people playing - with the game adding to that fun without demanding all of our focus.

That's right - zombie tomatoes!

I really only have one true "con" for the Big Fat Tomato Game.  I dislike the stockpiling rule.  I don't understand why you have to guess that you have more than 20 tomatoes in your harvest.  Specifically, I play with gamers, so this is often not going to be a "guess", but at least one of the people at the table will be tracking how many tomatoes he (and everyone else) has in his harvest.  I am ok with the fact that you can't harvest immediately, but I don't know the point of not allowing the players to count the tomatoes in their harvest to see if they have at least 20 tomatoes prior to attempting to stockpile.

The other thing that I will mention is something that you need to be aware of, but isn't a true con.  This is a card game.  And so, you will do better if you draw better cards.  This is true of most card games, and remains true in the tomato game.  If you draw the awesome card that lets you cancel an attack and send it back at the attacking player, you will do better than if you draw four copies of a less useful card.  If this bothers you, then you probably don't play terribly many card games.  However, I didn't feel that this game was so luck driven that it bothered me.

Overall, I would give The Big Fat Tomato Game an 8.5/10 as a kid's game.  It was really enjoyable, and I think that (assuming your kids can read), this is a good choice to play with your whole family.

If you are looking for great games for kids, you might also check out Hey, That's My Fish!, Scallywags, and Rory's Story Cubes.

I would like to thank Gamewright for providing me with a review copy of The Big Fat Tomato Game.