Troyes

Troyes is a rather dry-sounding game where you and your fellow players work (but in competition) to build a cathedral in the French city: playing the game represents 4 centuries in the town’s history. The board shows the city itself, and during play you’ll compete over three areas: the palace, the bishopric and the city hall, in all of which you can place your pieces to establish influence there. These pieces represent your influence in the military (red), religious (white) and mercantile (yellow) areas, and determine how many of each coloured dice you get to roll.

We can’t give a detailed breakdown of the rules here, but basically your dice are your actions for the turn – although you can also buy dice from other players as well. The dice are used to activate activity cards, combat events that threaten the city, construct the cathedral, and add your own pieces to the three areas mentioned above, increasing your share of the dice in subsequent turns. It’s pretty straightforward up to now, but added to this are a couple of interesting features:

There’s also an influence track — this is a point track that you can use to manipulate your dice rolls; one influence point will allow you to re-roll a dice, and four influence points will allow you to turn up to three of your dice to their reverse side – great if you roll a bunch of ones or twos. Influence is relatively easy to come by, and your space on the track will tend to ebb and flow during the game.

The other interesting thing is the 6 special characters — each player at the start of the game gets one of these, and keeps it secret. Each character gives points at the end of the game for various things — 5, 10 or 15 points on the influence track, for instance. The thing with these is that all players will receive these points if they’ve met the card criteria, so while each player has a secret objective, if you can deduce your opponents’ correctly you can make sure you too collect influence and reap the rewards.

It’s a clever game with a multitude of options, and if you can wrap your head around them there are some very creative ways to score points. One for the deep thinkers and Sudoku addicts.

Sam says

Cognitive overload! I'm afraid Troyes was too much for me, though I should clarify I generally prefer what gamers refer to as light and medium-weight games. This is heavy. That's not to say it's bad: Joe I believe has a lot of time for it, as do others. But despite the dice this is a dry, thinky experience where your challenge - very much as with the likes of Bruxelles 1893 - is harnessing the games disparate parts into a cohesive whole.

Joe says

I haven't played Troyes for a while, but I remember liking it quite a bit. I enjoy games with dice drafting, and I like the idea of hidden scoring, where players are trying to work out what each other are aiming towards at the end of the game. I can't see myself returning to Troyes (the game!) now though - these days I mostly prefer high-interaction, low rules-overhead games. I do love the visual design of Pearl Games though - this is definitely a cut above the usual 'medieval' theming.

The guru's verdict

Take That!

Take That!

There's definitely room for Take That in Troyes. You're competing for dominance in the three areas, and also trying to second-guess each others character cards.
Fidget Factor!

Fidget Factor!

High on a first play. And potentially high on subsequent plays. But you can utilize this time to concoct all manner of elaborate schemes...
Brain Burn!

Brain Burn!

High. It's not just about rolling dice and placing them; there's another level of mathematics at work.
Again Again!

Again Again!

It might not be an immediately accessible game, but once you're in the door there's a huge amount of replayability: there are 27 activity cards and only nine are used in any one game.