Designed by: Alexander Huemer
Lignum (from the latin lignum vitae – wood of life) is a game about wood: cutting, carrying, sawing, drying and selling wood at your lumber mill, over a two year period in the late 19th century. As you might expect, the bucolic theme is underlined by hard work…
Each player has their own little player board – their lumber mill – where they can gather, mill, dry and sell wood. And in each year, they spend spring, summer and fall going out into the forest and gathering what they can. The forest itself is represented by the main board, where you’ll see cutting areas (players secretly choose which one they’ll be cutting in!) and a path going around the outside of them.
The path facilitates your progress in the game, as there are about twenty places to stop on your journey. On your turn you can move as little or as far along as you like, as long as you don’t go backwards and stop only where there is room to. There are places to hire cutters for cutting, bearers for carrying, sawyers for sawing. There are also places where you can plan ahead (giving yourself a benefit in a future season) or pick up tasks, which essentially function as bespoke orders from customers. And in each season there are many spaces where you can claim something vital for the work ahead, whether it be saws for sawing, various methods of transit, cash, food, or crafts, which can be used to either generate money or another one-off benefit such as an extra worker.
When everyone reaches the end of the path, all your collected workers and tools are put to use: cutters cut, bearers carry and sawyers saw. Wood arriving in your mill can be set aside for firewood (for the winter) or placed in your shop, where it can either be sold, or dried – dried wood will fetch a better price in a future season.
When winter arrives logging is minimal, and the main focus is having enough food to eat and firewood to stay warm. The penalty for not having enough is harsh, as you’ll have to buy them at extortionate prices instead…
At the end of the second winter, players can sell whatever wood they have left in their shop and reward themselves money for their completed tasks. The richest player wins!
There's nothing spiteful or arbitrary in the game, but there is potential for players to mess with each other's plans either by competing over cutting areas (first there gets first dibs!) or grabbing something off the path you know another player is really desperate for!
High on a first play, dropping to moderate. If you like Lignum though, you probably don't mind a bit of down-time as you can spend it fine-tuning your plans.
It is a game about planning, as a first play will make abundantly clear. There are lots of little wood-related cogs that you need to join together - get it wrong and the game can be unforgiving, as no sawyer is going to hang around for three months waiting for you to buy a saw. Get it right, though, and it's lovely to feel the wheels turning.
The (comparatively!) basic game comes with a considerable amount of variety, but keen loggers will find there's also an expansion in the box, where you can flip the double-sided board over, and joiners come into play!
2-4
Players
14+
Years
90-120
Mins
Sam says
If the theme doesn't make the hairs on your neck stand up, remind yourself that one of the most bestsellingist-games-ever is about charging people rent. You're not turfing anyone out onto the street in Lignum, but the game is more interactive than it might sound: that summer walk along the path isn't a breezy stroll, but a tense, table-reading race where your choice is to plan for a solid but perhaps underwhelming return, or go for a higher yield with a riskier plan - risky because the things you need for your plan may be snatched up by other players before you get them! The simultaenous reveal for where everyone is going to cut their wood also adds a bit of spice - you probably don't want to double up with anyone on the juiciest spots, but then again you don't want to hand over a rewarding yield to anyone else either. I love these types of games, where there's a palpable tingling over whether your great move is going to come off or not, and when it - often, for me - doesn't, you have to come up with a Plan B. Lignum might not set your heart racing, but it can certainly give your brain a workout.