Game 1: Base game + Wonder Pack + Cities + Cities Anniversary (2P)
Game 2: Game 1 + Leaders + Leaders Anniversary (2P)
Enthusiasm: ❤️🖤🖤🖤
- 7 Wonders’ central mechanic is card drafting, it being one of the games (if not the game) to popularize that mechanic. And it continues to make me have concerns about the mechanic if you have some players who are considerably better at memorization than the others, particularly at smaller player counts.
- Ultimately, I think I prefer card drafting that’s more strategic (i.e. building a hand of cards and playing them out) over tactical (drafting each card as they’re played). It lets players concentrate more on building their strategies over looking at which card(s) would disrupt their opponents’ strategies.
- The Cities expansions adds black cards, which have a variety of different effects. The catch is that the number of cards isn’t tied to the number of players, so on small player counts, they come up a lot more often. So, during Age I and II, they can end up interfering with building the economic side of your tableau, making it much more difficult in Age II and III to build cards.
- Continuing on the theme of issues with small player counts, the “free city” idea used for two player games is pretty unbalanced, as one player has considerable advantages over the other, due to the additional incoming card the other player doesn’t get, as well as the ability to take two cards out of the pool (let alone the ability to direct where resources are purchased from). Which, ultimately, explains why 7 Wonders Duel came about.
- The Leaders expansion isn’t as good as I was hoping. It does offer some direction for tableau building (for the most part), but they tend to grant only small benefits up front in return for gambling on long-term synergies (since multi-leader strategies start getting revealed in advance due to the one leader/Age restriction and with the variance in what cards can show up).
- The point salad worked as intended, as each player ended up generating points from different sources during each game (military, scientific, civilian, leader, wonder).