The folks at Board Game Gumbo are happy to share another game night summary from Jeremy Dobler. This time, Jeremy tells us what he thinks about the new game called Baghdad: The City of Peace. It’s a game made by Fabio Lopiano and Nestore Mangone, who also made Shackleton Base, a game many Gumbo fans like. Alley Cat Games put out Baghdad, and Roland MacDonald did the artwork.
I got to try out Baghdad, and it has a really interesting way of doing things, like a puzzle you have to solve with your actions.
When it’s your turn, you’ll slide a row of cards. If it’s a daytime card, you get some good stuff from it. If it’s a nighttime card, you add it to your scoring pile, but only if you meet certain conditions as it leaves your board. If you don’t meet the conditions, the daytime card just gets thrown away and does nothing. The nighttime card is removed from the game completely.
After that, you play a new card into your row. This card gives you special symbols, called tags, to use for your next moves. First, any boat symbols let you move your boats down the river. The goal is to get them to a dock, which helps you get more points later. Along the way, you can also pick up resources you might need.
Next, you move your Vizier, who is like a main helper, around the city. You can do different things like helping sick people, teaching students, adding books to the library, collecting old treasures, putting up special buildings, or working on the big palace.
Helping sick people gives you things you can use to build the palace. Teaching students gives you a special tag you can use one time later. Adding the second, third, fourth, or fifth books to your board lets you give them to the library. This can get you resources, powerful extra moves, or more tags. Picking up old treasures gives you points based on where you put them or for extra points at the end of the game, but only if they are different kinds. Building things gives you extra actions when your Vizier goes to that part of the city. And finally, building parts of the great palace makes you able to score points in one of four ways at the end of the game, and it also gives you a small but helpful one-time bonus.
To do any of these things, you look at how many tags you have on the three cards you’ve played. Then you take a token from the spot you moved to and add it to your player board next to a matching or lower number of symbols. Sometimes, if you get two or three tokens lined up one above the other, you get an extra bonus.
But you need to be careful! If you leave your Vizier in a spot next to sick people or students, it will cost you favor or money. If you lose too much favor, you get shame tokens. These tokens are worth -3 points at the end of the game, and you can’t get rid of them.
Then you draw a new card from either the day or night piles, and you fill up any empty spots in the city. After that, it’s the next player’s turn.
Once all the day and night cards have been drawn, and the last player plays their final card, everyone checks to see if they can score points in up to eight different ways. You get points for how many sick people you helped, students you taught, different treasures you collected, books you gave to the library, ships you docked, nighttime cards you scored, builders you sent to the palace, or buildings you put up.
It’s possible to get zero points in these areas, even if you did a lot in one category, simply because you didn’t do the specific action that lets you score for it.
However, you will always score points for a few other things, like having level 5 buildings, finishing the top parts of the palace, your scored nighttime cards, the value of different treasures on your board, and any favor you still have. But remember, you lose 3 points for every shame token you collected.
I’m really looking forward to seeing how this game plays with three or even four people.
