Gutenberg

In Gutenberg, players represent early advocates of the printing press, completing orders to score points. Each order demands the use of typesetting, but you can add in ink and the use of special abilities to make them more rewarding. How it all works is via a series of secret bids over the game’s six rounds.

The shared board basically is an array of the things you are bidding for – orders, inks, improving abilities, improving printing houses, and patronage. Before we go through them all, let’s take a look at a printing house: each player has their own in front of them and it tracks both their abilities (typesetting, woodcutting, binding and illuminating) and their gears. You can have up to three gears in your printing house, that rather nicely interconnect via cogs and turn at the start of each new round. The gears are there to provide bonuses: free ink, for instance, or the ability to buy type cheaply. You begin with three letters but can buy more at any time, assuming you can afford it: your fourth letter costs four coins, your fifth costs five and so on. Each gear can be used once per round.

Back to the main board: Gutenberg has a bidding system where players secretly bid a certain amount of cubes to take a particular action. If you’ve bid the most on orders, for instance, you get to choose before anyone else (ties are broken in turn order). If you bid no cubes at all, you don’t get to take an order! Once orders have been taken, then the same process goes for inks, then improving your abilities, taking gears to add to your printing house (which can be activated straight away!) and finally patronage. Patronage initially means a freebie: a free order, ability improvement, some cash or some ink. But as the rounds pass buy you can impress a patron by having met the ability requirements they expect, and you can claim a Patron card: worth a not-inconsiderable 8 points at the end of the game.

After all the actions have been resolved, all players can fulfil orders. Each order is a combination of typesetting and ink/abilities, but on the typesetting part is mandatory: the flourishes are optional. However they’re worth doing if you can, as they’ll bring you in a big points haul, especially if you manage to complete all of it. You get to keep your letters, but lose the ink. Everything left on the board (except patron cards) is removed and restocked for the next round. The starting player moves clockwise and everyone gives one of their bidding cubes to the player who just passed it on. This way the starting advantage is counter-balanced by each subsequent player having one more cube than those who went before them.

After six rounds, the players add any Patron cards points to their scores, and the player with the most points wins.