Aelderman - Euro Gamers 🤩😃 City Exploring, Building - One Round Playthrough Board Game

[Music] hi it's Tyrant and Stella from Maple University thanks for joining us today we'll be doing a one-round playthrough of elderman and teaching it as we play this game is designed by Johannes rogal and published by Rocco games let's get to the game okay here we are to do some trading let's do that sailing trading yes back in the Hanseatic League um a favorite of uh a favorite historical location for Euro trading games I think lots of them yes so this is where we are in the northern Hanseatic League up through the Baltic Sea and fundamentally this is a seafaring trading game we will be going out around to all these different places uh gaining Goods trading goods and getting rewards out of that and there's an interesting trade mechanism in this game which uses this wheel so what the different cities will will be giving us will depend on where this wheel is and what they'll be purchasing will depend on the cards that are out there so things will be constantly changing because there's thick of cards there yes so a big part of the game is all about that we will be there'll be a bit of area control out here so you'll see there are influence cubes we've got these green ones here which are there for the two-player game as a dummy player so we'll be trying to gain our influence out in those areas to score some area majority points and we can also build up the uh the Central City of Lubeck so this down here represents Lubeck again there's some starting dummy buildings here for the two-player game uh but we'll be purchasing properties and constructing buildings in here which will give us some ongoing benefits as well as some area majority points here also and some costs ongoing cost yes um ultimately the aim of the game is to get Council votes so this icon here this is the victory Point icon and over five rounds of play we're going to be trying to get as many of these as we can and one place to get them is the council at the end of each round we will be using our influence cubes that we'll be collecting through the game to bid on these cards and that will become a key thing you know it's a place to get 10 votes here so that's a lot of votes uh but other bonuses and incomes and things you can get there as well those are sort of the main ways of scoring in the game there's a few other things out there there are some places you can just cash in money to buy uh favor from the council and buy some votes there are some in-game objectives up here that we can try to chase and so on uh there are three there are 10 different resources that we can gain and store in this game and they're really three different types there are building materials wood and glass and Hammers and stone which will be largely used other than trading for building these buildings down here uh there's food so meat beer fish and wheat and we'll be able to use them on hosting feasts in the city which is a great way of getting influence cubes and then there's two luxury goods which are spices and Pelt are these ones here a bit more difficult to get they can be worth a lot when you're trading and or you can just hoard them because they're all worth points at the end of the game so with that we'll just show the the end of the setup here there's an element of setup we get these uh starting drafting tiles here that we can take to give us our starting resources so this is what I've got here gives me some starting money and gives me some starting incomes so from we don't produce in round one but we'll produce from round to onwards and I start with a wood a fish and a wheat production from my starting tiles well I thought we'd be a production him but it cost me one per production so I had to pay usually comes with building these buildings but you know sometimes you just want to get that because you want to get something else in the starting draft indeed now you also get to take one of the Improvement tiles so these four circles up here these are different improvements you can get and they'll give you a once per round benefit I have to write these slots here have the rightmost one please the rightmost one okay that when you trade six Goods it will give you some extra benefits the cube and one money and these all slide down and then we shall reveal a new one so we will start round one of five here we are in round one uh here we've got the turn order I'm going first Stella's going second we skip production in round one and then we go into What's called the four quarters so each of these we can see this first one here it's got four little boats on it that means on turn one or quarter one of this round we each have four action points and each of these will reveal progressively and be worth somewhere between two and five action points so I will take my four action points and that is one round yes yes I will take my four action points then you take your four action points and then we flip the next one how to take actions I can move my boat along one of these trails and take a path around the board each City I pass through I must spend at least one action point on the actions printed on its card and you'll see on this card here there's many of these have six different actions here there's a lot of actions staring at you at the start of the game but the ones on the left cost one action point the ones in the middle cost two the ones on the right cost three so I must spend at least one action point I can take up to two actions in a city one on the top row and one on the bottom row there's also a generic generic action that you can do yes there's also an all-purpose trade action that you can do in any City instead of the car if I want in addition to my four action points I also have a fifth bonus action point I gained this as part of my starting tiles you can collect those through the game and you can always spend them on your turn up to having a maximum of six action points per turn little uh trick up my sleeve so first thing I'm going to do I'm going to sail from Lubeck to our log while there I'm going to spend one action point on this action on the left and what that's going to do I'm going to spend three coins and one influence Cube from my Supply back to the general supplier to gain one of these Improvement tiles and I'm going to get this one this is uh this will give me benefit in the yellow banned cities I can see that you can also do the bottom bottom trade or a self for goods but I don't have the goods that I would need so please listen there yeah it has to be wood fish meat and one of anything that you want out all right now I'm going to sail up to Oslo and I'm going to start to do some trading here so the sailing itself doesn't cost you a point but you can't skip a city without doing at least one action point so I'm going to use this action here on the bottom left one action point and that's going to let me gain Goods in osloan so to work out what I gain this is a blue City so I look at the blue wedge of my wheel and I'm doing the one action point action so I look at the inner ring and that's going to give me one stone so I take a stone for free and I add that to one of my storage crates so timing is a major part in this game you want the wheel to be in the right position for you to take the action that you're targeting one way that I can manipulate that is with this action here up the top this is a two action point action and it lets me rotate my wheel twice so I'm going to rotate the wheel two steps normally you'll rotate it every time it's your new turn um in this case I'm going to do an extra one I'm going to rotate it for two steps and two action points and that also gives me two dollars as reward so the action there is rotate the wheel twice and gain two dollars so there we go I've used up all my action points I am not going to use my bonus action point I'm going to hang on to that so that is the end of my turn so now it is my turn to have also also first action sale and in here I have to do at least one action although I don't actually like my options there not at the moment anyway so I'm gonna do the generic trade action I'm gonna just pay one to gain one board yes this is called alternative Trail alternatively yeah alternative sorry alternative Freight yes you can always buy any one of the goods uh or you can sell any one of the goods for money as shown here and the price isn't too bad but the you are spending a whole action on a money transaction so it is a weak action it is a weak action but hopefully you'll be able to show you later why I I've done that yep so it's been one actually so now up down to three I will sail there now this is the lineup action that Taran was talking about so this is the right area so you see this is the right area when you see this thing matches and you see here so you can buy something if only this circle matches and in this case it's Appel yes so the the three action point purchased there you've actually got a choice in this city that's right because that matches you can either get a beer a stone and a wooden crate a wooden crate will change depending on which city you're in or you can get the one on the other side because it matches yeah I like to get the palette please so I'll get the Pelt I choose the belt and one Cube for me so this goes to my storage I have to have enough space in my storage there are other ways to upgrade to get more which is on the top left screen and that actually action costs three because to get something on the outer rim of the wheel that needs three action points and that's basically all my action points done okay so there we have it turn one is done now we we flip this so the icon on the back reminds us to rotate our Wheels One Step and then we flip this over oh dear it's a week round this time we've only got two action points this time okay so that restricts what we can do somewhat indeed so I am going to sail down to Mama and spend both of my action points on gaining Goods so this is a yellow City two action points so I get a crate which is two wood and a beer there we go beer nothing matches you can't you can't afford three action points anywhere on the outer wheel well I could I do have my bonuses that's right yeah and what I'm going to do here I am going to spend it now because I can't wait till next turn when the action points come again you have to move to a city to take the action and I want to take this action now so I'm going to spend this one action point to take this bonus action I've got down here so this tells me that when I'm in yellow I can spend an action point to put an influence Cube down in my city so I'm going to use it this round so flip it flip it over and place this Cube now I've got two options I can either place it here for free or I can oops or I can place it up here to make that into a subsidiary of mine and that would be a place that I could take City actions we haven't even discussed City action no not yet so that's really how you build up this area and how you get a few things as well over there in the corner and now you are Mia tarenfelk I could be in Malibu I could be the mayor but we all have a subsidiary in Lubeck we can always go back to Lubeck and do City actions and you need money to do some City actions so I'm actually going to just place the cube here um I'll come back I'll do back to do my city actions because it's right nearby yeah what's good here is spreading them out so that you've got a whole lot of places to do City actions from regardless of where you're sailing around the map that's where you can do to see the action obviously you can't do it here because there's none of that symbol but you can do here here and so on yes all right so there we go that is your three actions three action I should say two actions possible all right I have two actions and I'm actually going to move here to Riga obviously we lay down our ship because it's an overhead camera and I will do oh I will use both actions to actually do a trade so I will actually give up six so you can see I was collecting the Pelt because of that reason so I'll be able to get from left to right one word one of anything would be the the visits and the two and the word again the meat and the Pelt so all six there um that would actually going to give me 15 money yes so this is it's consistent wherever you are on the board that's correct and two cubes which one of them I can place in there as like that or I can place it as a subsidiary civil action will cost me another five which I'm going to do so I'll be mayor of rigor very good and then so those results go away now remember I have these bonus that I took at the start of the game so doing six straight will get me extra one point one coin and one more Cube so I've got plenty full of Cubes there and I flip that over yes these will flip back at the start of each round now obviously I don't have any action points so I can't do anything else in this city but now I have see the action yes so you may now so Now's the Time I Think to explain the City action series four different city actions and you can do as many of them as you want if you've moved into a city that contains your Cube this round and that includes on the round you place it so you can buy property these are all blocks that are open in the streets of Lubeck even though you're in Riga you're doing this remotely by wire you can put these down to give you a place to construct a building and the cost is four coins each gets more expensive as the game goes on and the city gets richer you can construct buildings there's 20 different options for the buildings that you can construct they have all sorts of different abilities they can give you income they can give you more storage you can buy a storage room for example to give you the more storage you need you could unlock more spaces for these upgrades heaps of different options but none that you can build with just a fish so yeah um yes so none of those actually need ing mainly the building materials and money the third thing you can do once per turn is you can host a feast and the round tiles will tell you how how much a feast is basically you're putting on a feast in your city and there are small feasts and big feasts so you basically you pay the food and it's a really good way of getting influenced cubes into your supply feed the people and they will give you influence this one basically costs three weed one fish we'll have one fish and you get three Cube yeah uh and the last thing you can do is you can complete one of these objectives so if you've got three uh income of influence or if you've built three buildings or three small buildings or two buildings in the San Marion District or if you're holding two spices you can get those rewards and those never replenish all right so with that I will do stack of colors is my color so I will try to build it here now the first round is there and say this is cheaper so four next one is already five so I'm gonna buy it here for four I might actually get two so I will get this get the second one I also looking to get that card the minimum to one on certain area which is Saint Marion and this area is separated by this so I actually at the moment if I built two I mean not yet if I build my property there then I will win area control there yes so the uh the gold water buildings are worth two points for area control and the silvers are worth one yes thank you and these are the votes that uh area control will be worth at the end of the game total cost is four times two is eight and I think that is all my see the action I can't hold face I can do anything else and that's it all right so we move on to the third turn we rotate our Wheels one more time and this time we've got three action points three action points I need to start uh doing some City actions so I'm going to head down to Lubeck and before I do see well before or after I do City actions I have to spend an action point here I'm going to spend two action points to do this action here so this one is two upgrades and a coin so I get the coin and then I can pick any two of my resources and upgrade them to the next level and I can swap columns as well so I can turn a I can turn a hammer into a meet for example now I've got my eye on the tool Smith as a building to construct so that's going to need another glass so I'm going to upgrade one of my beers into a glass with one of those so I know I'm going to need these and then looking ahead I'm going to go out over here and it looks like I need more glass over here so I'm going to turn my second mirror also into glass so there we go there we go I've done that action that was two action points now I'm going to do City actions so I can buy property it's going to cost me four money four money to buy a property I reckon I can get over uh this guy and send Jacob buy so I'll go there and then I will do another City action which is to construct the toolsmith so it's going to cost me two wood two glass and one money okay so I get a toolsmith from the display the stack of the building I pop it onto here toolsmith gives me one tool production and one tool immediately so when you get a building the production happens immediately but because this is a building with a final value of two it will also cost me two dollars to run so I need to make sure I've got enough money by the end of uh by the start of the next round to pay for this otherwise it's going to start to cost me uh cost me votes it's not very uh honorable not meeting me a tarent okay um I don't have the money to afford anything else here so I'm going to spend my last remaining action points to sail up to alborg again I mean the selling is free but the action is this um I I don't have what I would need to sell for goods there and so I'm going to do the well I have to do alternative trade this time I'm going to cell I'm going to sell my glass six that will get me six money because I need some money I need some money for my later actions you've got a lot of influence and a lot of money I really needed to uh focus on getting those Early Trades working okay and that's my turn that's uh yes I also have three action points I am going to sell from Riga to frisbee right there I'm going to spend one action point to do this action so this is a yellow area and I'll get one fish there for one action so please hand me the fish now I have two fish and then I'm gonna sail to a Stockholm there's a DOT there spend one action point to do the top action and pay six money to get a an action point income that looks really good so that'll give you an extra action point each round that's right unlike the buildings you don't also get that immediately okay and I will spend my last action point to do the last one also yellow give me another fish another that's basically it that's my three actions all right so we go to the final turn we rotate our Wheels one more time and because I did those extra movements I've done a half lap and every time you do a half lap you get to put a cube down in your city so I'm going to do that here in alborg I'm going to put this down here and because I've filled a row it changes out the card so these cards will be constantly changing every second influence which goes down changes out the card now we flip this over here we've got a hey we've got a big turn so five action points this turn that is the most that you can get on its own so one of the things I'm finding is that it can be difficult to get these low value resources because they're not available in huge chunks absolutely everywhere but there's some nice incomes that I can buy over here so I'm going to spend my turn getting income of building resources so from alborg I'll sail over to Edinburgh and I will spend six coins on this action here with one action what income to gain two wood incomes so do I have wood income yet I think I do there we go so I get two additional wood income now I'll get three wood every turn um then I'll do the bottom half of this I'll spend three action points to get the green outer ring and here in the green outer ring it's money so I'm going to get six money and a fish apply for some fish all right then for my final action point after sailing down to London I'm going to spend five coins and get a stone income so this is this is really going to help me build up what I've got going on over here getting these building incomes will make it a lot easier for me to construct these is my theory anyway but I'm out of action points so that is my turn and that is my round okay so five action points first one I will fairness handle spend one action point to do this top left action which you spend three Money free money and one influence or one Cube yep to gain one of these four ones so I get the leftmost one please okay so this is uh when you complete a feast you can do one upgrade one upgrade for free from there I will move to a revel span one action sorry two actions I should say to do this action so this is the downgrade which we haven't seen before I can do it twice and I get one coin let me get the coin first I will downgrade two items from fish I want to downgrade it to four weight please so please swap me yeah so when you do the downgrade you can you can exchange it to any combination of lower resources so you could have gone for wood or a mix of wood and wheat but I'm seeing that you're lining up for a feast well to be honest I think I'll get one one wood instead of something so three wheat and one wood what is Handy for building and from there I have two more points I will head from Revel to Riga where I have I'm the influencer there yes and I will do I'll do the swap so this one here one action point with three so all my money gone and I will swap this let's just swap any two of these action cards between each other around the board now you can't then also take the action of the one you swapped yep but it puts it in the right spot for you later on that's okay so I like the look of the wood and the stone because that's what I'm trying to do to build buildings I'm going to get it there sir you get that one there we go I sailed all the way to the other side of the Baltic Sea for that and you just paid money to bring it so he's a feasts for everybody A Feast for from Stella so round one it requires me to give up three wheat and one fish yep and gets me three cubes and you also put a cube on there because there cannot be more feasts in a round than there are players in the game right that tracks those right and these figures so I have this bonus here so whenever I do a fish I can upgrade one item so this would well it doesn't really matter now now the upgrade upgrading it I'll just get a stone and that's it cool all right that leaves you with one more action point so I will sail to frisbee and I'll get whatever it is in there so my wheels align here so it gets me one box one box equals to two woods so that's one in yellow in yellow so it means that as much as things are changing around the board each of these regions always has a specialization which it will favor yeah and that's that's it that's around as well turn this around so it's almost around so now we go to the council phase so uh we're in very different positions for this Council phase I have two influence and you have 10.

so we do two rounds of blind bidding and whoever bids the most gets the card of their choice we have a bit second base gets the next one and so on as long as you bid at least one Cube if there's a tie then whoever is holding the most money uh is seen to be the wealthiest and have the most influence so we did top row then bottom row the top row there's always one that will give you 10 points there's always one that lets you take a one of the improvements and then any others depending on your Play account are random down the bottom these are all random and some of them combo down here you can see this icon matches so you would get this plus a wheat that's bad so do the first one now it's important to note that to be allowed to take the 10 points card you have to bid at least five influence uh which I am obviously incapable of doing and you are obviously capable so ready go look five five there's no point in the air there's no point for you to bid more than one I guess so pop your cubes on there or sorry no you take the card but leave the cubes there that is 10 point at the end of the game for me and my options I can either get an improvement or I can get this one which is a set collecting cards so as I get more and more through the game it would level up the number of points it's worth I don't know that could be tricky I think I'll try I'm gonna try to score some uh cheap points out of this because of course once I'm on them who else would want them right sure I know you have one you can beat zero or one correct um I have more money than you so if you only bid one then that's actually true of course I got two of course and of course I'll take this one all right so you get that plus you get the wheat yeah it's uh lined up thank you and my choices this is not a bad option so I can get a spice or an extra action it's really good that's actually three points at the end for games kind of a cheap spice yeah I'm going to get that all right um some of these are actually ongoing bonuses this one is not so doesn't matter but there we go I shall add a spice to my collection and so that is the end of round one so now we'll move on to round two we will show you the reset and production for round two and then we'll finish our one round play through first thing we do is check player order and that is based on who has uh spent the most influence on the council so that is you you will go to player one I will go to player two and these are returned to our suppliers next we reveal the new round indicator so you get that Cube back and this shows us what's going on now property is more expensive and we've got small and big feasts which are worth more influence thirdly we take back all of these tokens so remember there was a two a five two threes and two fours we shuffle all of these up and randomize the number of action points for next round so these will come in here and each one of these four once again is going to rotate our wheel um and the other two are there now we renew the council area so this one always stays this one is always filled by the 10 point card if we're playing at three or more players this would always be a three-point card anything else is discarded and then replenished from the top of the deck so here we've got this one's an ongoing effect gold buildings are cheaper to buy from a wood standpoint this one is a stone this one is a glass and this one's an action point and two points so it's nice here when you've got this sort of bidding it's always nice when there's clearly some that are better than others yeah the most to you I mean 10 points is usually always good because it's 10 points nothing to sneeze at all right and now to finish off we do our production phase so we gain all the goodies on our production steps and have to pay the uh the resources at the end okay you go first so I get a stone a hammer a hammer wheat a fish and three wood three wood now can you hold them all I actually can't hold them all yeah I didn't foresee this so I should probably build a storage building at some point to get me something extra so yeah you've got one you have already one of the spice so if you do see the action you get that yeah two spies I can get that oh yeah built the building which costs four only four wood uh the storage building forward and free money so that's probably good to keep the water if you want better hang on to some of it then all right and then I have to pay my two money into the supply money one that I have to pay so I will gained what happened then that's the case then I get minus two minus two points at the end of the game and then I will get one BR and one off the action point which is Handy okay my action points there and we also flip back our improvements and the last Improvement is swept from the board so that these remain fresh okay and there we have it we would now move into we would Now flip this we would Advance our wheels and we would start taking turns in the new turn order and there we have it that's one round of element so this is a five round game um you can see you've seen most of the basic mechanisms that come out here these buildings do a variety of things some of them let you cash in resources for points in the uh in the income phase um the area control side of this becomes a much bigger element as the game goes on and you've got resources to throw around so say you're well set up here to you know win area control here I'm already ahead in some jacket buyer so 10 potential points for me there all of these cubes also impact area controls up here and I'm in a much better position for that at the moment you've been focusing uh really on the having those places to do City actions that's right I'm set up to build buildings soon hopefully and I've got so I've got so much going on here I think probably I've got a lot of building resources and I think my next thing would be to sell my way back spend some of them on building I would need to pick up some money on the way back to get more property wow pick up money hey so you make it sound so easy you have to just plan ahead basically in this game but yeah also really try to uh pick up this maybe if I could come back with seven dollars I could pick up this extra spice I could get this the extra storage that storage is going to be really good um as the incomes go up the game also comes with a shorter version so I mean we've thrown a lot of mechanisms at you there there is a beginning version of the game which you play over two rounds you don't use all the cards so you've got about half of the mechanisms and you get a you get a couple of missions or a couple of objectives to chase at the start of the game so it's kind of a good way of getting used to managing the wheel thinking ahead for for how to get resources while being targeted by the by the actions you're taking so yeah definitely it's a good first step towards playing the full game of element indeed so that's it hopefully enjoy that and that's one round playthrough of elderman we hope that you enjoyed the video we are using a prototype copy of the game and so the rules and components may not be final and do check out the project page for the game we'll put a link to that in the description below if you find this video useful please help us by hitting that like button subscribe to us you can also hit the middle in the corner to do that and hit the Bell icon so if you want to know when we have new videos you can also follow me on Instagram for my board games Journey comments suggestions and feedback are all welcome in the comments section below thanks for watching see you next time