We’re diving into one of our recent favorites this week as Orléans was our top “new to us” game on the site for 2015. Since then, our opinions have drifted in different directions and we thought it would be fun to look at how the game has aged for us only a few years later.
If this is your first time visiting Games Precipice, our focus is on game design theory and ideas that can make games great. In writing about Orléans, the large majority of our conversation is a deep dive into this brilliant game applying the game design frameworks we’ve been writing about recently. To help frame the discussion, this is more than just a write-up about Orléans; this is an article about Orléans in the greater conversation of pool building games. So let’s jump right in.
Prototypical Pool Building
Orléans is best classified as a bag building game and it shares a number of familiar concepts with a deck building game like Dominion or a dice building game like Quarriors. We recently covered these various mechanics collectively in a series on pool building games.
Despite the similarities on the surface, these games can be tricky to break down as a group. One approach we’ve taken to look in-depth at these mechanics has been to identify the common skills and tasks players are carefully considering while building their deck in Ascension or filling their bag in Orléans.
In Pool Builders… players manage long-term efficiency
A common bond among pool building games is that these mechanics relay a marathon mentality to players. Orléans is a game of putting one foot ahead of the other in order to string together a strategy over the long-term. By the end of the game, a player will rarely be able to pinpoint the exact moment or turn that pushed them toward victory, since each turn the player moves the needle forward just enough to see observable progress in a race of efficiency.
Keyflower is a few years old now, and it isn’t particularly difficult to get ahold of, so it might be familiar to many of our readers. For a quick introduction in case it’s not: Keyflower is a tile game that takes players through a year of growing and managing a fledgling village, with the game playing out over four seasons and having the in-universe goal of building up enough resources to survive through the winter. Its most notable feature is its clever approach to worker placement, where workers can be used either to perform actions or as currency to bid on improvements to the village. It won or was nominated for a handful of awards from 2012-2014 and maintains a strong presence as a top-20 strategy game at BoardGameGeek since its release in 2012.
Today we’re thrilled to dive deep into a game with endless utility, Power Grid. In our recent readership survey, it was by far the most requested game for a design analysis, so naturally we are happy to oblige.
We like to conclude each series of topics with our Design Analysis series where we can dive into some of our favorite games from both past and present. To wrap up this group we thought it’d be fun to look at two games simultaneously on topics like Satisfaction, Pacing and Player Control. Lewis & Clark and Concordia were two of our favorite games we played last year and I think you’ll agree each design makes for some interesting observations.
We like to conclude each group of monthly topics with our Design Analysis series where we can dive into some of our favorite games from both past and present. Our most recent series we covered game design topics such as Satisfaction, Pacing and Game-Defining Concepts. This week we’re going to take a look at Uwe Rosenberg’s bean trading classic Bohnanza.
We like to conclude each group of monthly topics with our Design Analysis series where we can dive into some of our favorite games from both past and present. In the last half of 2014 and earlier this year we wrote about game design topics like Theme, Downtime and Pacing. This week I’m tackling a giant in the field, Twilight Struggle, which has spent years at the apex of BoardGameGeek’s 
