Age of Artisans Review and interview

Kia Ora koutou and welcome to our view of the expansion for architects of the west kingdom them age of artisans I'm joined by the designer of their game sam mcdonald hey everyone so Sam's going to be with us at the end of the video to go through a couple of questions that we've got on the game and he'll also be joining us for a podcast involving his games and other games later on and they'll be a link to that in the description below so here's the video age of artisans is the first expansion for architects of the West Kingdom annex run through what's in the expansion the good bits the okay bits but not so good bits so the first thing the game adds are the pieces for a six player I'm not sure you'd want to play architects of six players but you can if you want and at the very least it's two extra characters with their variable player starts and a new choice of player color probably most significant addition to the game are the adornments and tool cards these are multi-use cards with the yellow bar at the top representing an adornment which is an improvement to a building and the red bar at the bottom representing a tool which is an improvement to an apprentice the way you get these is at the guild hall and the expansion comes with an updated guild hall overlay your build buildings and improve the cathedral as normal by placing a worker in the guild hall permanently but to gain tools or adornments you have to place a second worker into the guild hall but that worker is placed on top of an existing one tools cost you nothing but the worker placed but adornments cost you two tax and three coins mix go through how tours work first here we have the pickpocket apprentice when you activate the tax stand you not only get the money from the tax stand you also get a gold if you added this tool to the pickpocket you would not only get the gold and the money you'd also get one stone each time you activate the tax stand now of course the obvious combo of this is to add it to the stone cutter so you'd get two extra stone each time you use the quarry these tools only activate when the apprentice actually activates adornments on the other hand go on buildings you have built and what they do is they give you two things first of all they give you the bonus on the left immediately when the adornment is built and at the end of the game they give you bonus victory points based on the number of the Gold Flag the next most significant change is the inclusion of artisans and artisans are like super workers each player only gets one and they have three default powers first they count as two workers on the turn they are placed next they reduce the cost of using an area by two money and finally they negate the loss of one valor on a location where they are used and while these are quite had the effects I didn't find any of them particularly game breaking all that powerful but speaking of the black market there's also a new overlay here this is the one location where you can pick up a tool without permanently locking down a worker there's also a dozen new buildings many of which focus on the tools and adornments of extra points as well as 12 new apprentices there are our two traders that allowed you to trade for gold at the Kings storehouse as well as the abbot who gives you extra money when you trade there's a new pickpocket that gives you extra money at the texts and and the antagonist who makes your placements of the town center more powerful then there are the strongmen and each of these provides a buff to your artisan character finally there is a look at who improves your ability of the guardhouse and probably my favorite characters in the expansion even forces who give you bonuses whenever you take capture actions the last component edition and you sideboards for your player board that have a wagon where you can store excess goods and show you the scoring for tools and adornments but strangely my favorite change to the game is one you can do without buying the expansion Architects has always had a little bit of a first player advantage and one small change to the rules is that the last player gets to pick an apprentice from those set up at the start of the game and then in Reverse player order each player picks up an apprentice not only does this address the first player advantage that existed in the game before it actually gives you a start to your engine and someone you can put a tool on from the start of the game although that's a small change to the game I think it's a really really good one and for the solo mode the main change is that whenever you draw a guild hall the AI player will take the most expensive adornment they can and they'll get the victory points for that at the end of the game overall I think the age of artisans expansion is pretty good with the adornments until us being the standout part of the expansion for me I think they'll add an extra decision point in the game and open up some fresh approaches for people overall though I don't think this expansion will fix architects if you didn't like to start with it's very much the same game still just with more options and more variety if you fundamentally did not enjoy Architects of the West Kingdom this is not gonna fix that for you what an entertaining video now gotta talk to say about some of the things I thought in the expansion were really good some I thought were not so good and so I thought we needed a bit more discussion so said well my favorite things the expansion was these the adornments and the tools can you give us a bit of backstory on the sort of design ethos or you can put them together yeah so these are the craft cards and you can either 10 min to adornments or tools we kind of had this idea with paladins and I guess circadians and Raiders as well that we really like multi-use cards yeah so there's two different ways of kind of getting rid of the cards so there's another layer of interaction there what we thought from the base game was that money wasn't as important as it should be so by money you mean the coins because there's the whole capture mechanism but what you would find is people would round up a whole bunch of workers put them in prison in it with this big pile of coins and in their life know what you know if they didn't have a black market or a merchant engine they didn't have anything to spend the money on and because the doorman's cost five doesn't beer that's another sink for that yeah exactly exactly so and it's another way of getting points it also encourages people to build buildings right so they have to build in order to upgrade the apprentices or their buildings but the thing that I like the most is the tools because it allows the tool cards here it allows you to customize the princes like crazy and there's all these combinations that we probably haven't even thought of yet we've made sure that's not overpowered because you can only make use of them once per chance they trigger luck yes so in the video the example I used was a plus or on a character that already gets plus also as soon as you place them down sorry start this is your place in that person Down and boom, 3 right exactly yeah yeah so I think that is heaps of fun and people can make these new kind of engines that weren't really viable in the base game like they could have a whole capturing engine with enforcers and with conspirators and those sorts of people and they can attach all these tools to them be earning lots of resources in ways that they wouldn't have been able to do and the base game yeah yeah that was my experience as well all right moving on to the second one which is one of those try to convince me something so is the the Artisan's the meeple's that have a few extra bonuses one of them's reducing the amount of honour loss you get one of them is reducing the cost of how much a location costs to use and the third and final use is they cameras to workers on the turn they are placed yes but there's only one yep tell me a story why is this better than I initially thought it was why is this better well I think there are these lots of things that you can use them for but but the main thing is that it gives players a power turn from time to time yeah for example I'll talk about the mines at the mines your initial placement you can only get clay and you have the way for a certain worker to get gold which is good and I think it's balanced but sometimes you just really need that gold and there might not be gold in the in the black market and you can't be bothered getting clay what are you gonna use it for so you put your artisan in there and the mines you get that gold that you need immediately the other thing that it does is it encourages people who may be a little bit shy maybe a little bit good to go to the black market because I find the black market very fun and they this allows them to go there without the virtue loss although that will end up in prison but that's a quicker way of giving the guy back because he is gonna end up in prison and then you'll be able to get him or her back I'm not sure if a lthe artisan is a man or a woman but yeah and use you want to use it as much as possible yeah that's one thing I notice in games I've played a bit people avoid losing virtue quite rapidly even though probably some of the stronger strategies involve dumping that virtue down loading up on debts and then trying to redeem yourself at the end game yeah and the one other thing about the artisan which i think is kind of cool is we have these three new apprentice cards which are called the strongmen and what they do is they they will buff the artisan in particular so one allows the artisan when he's to avoid paying to coins and so if you're right at the bottom of the virtue track you're avoiding to tax and to coins but you're already losing you're already getting a two-point reduction with these four points yeah yeah yeah exactly so you can have some other really cool engines around placing the artisan capturing him back and then placing them again and that's a valid strategy as well come and the final one I wanted to cover was you've changed the opening sequence of the game so now the first the last player gets to pick one character from the previous row and in that counts back and I want to ask you did you kick yourself when you originally put the game out and didn't have their role in as soon as I saw it I was like why give you if you play with the expansion just change that role anyway just straight away last player gets to pick an apprentice and it goes back round to the first player who gets the last bucket apprentices for me so it kicks off start your engine yeah that's right and I think why we thought of it for this expansion actually we have done it in paladins and thought why don't we do that but but also with the addition of the tools and there's a black market spot which allows you to buy at all without having built in the guild hall yeah so with that with the addition of the tools then you want players to have an apprentice already that they could put a tool on from turn one yeah yeah there makes makes perfect sense all right so if you wanna hear a bit more from Sam about his games and a whole bunch of other things check out the podcast and I'll link to that in the description below and you enjoyed this video like it subscribe to the channel and support us on patreon