Friday Filler: Equinox

At each equinox, mythical creatures gather in the magical forest to compete to be the ones to have their tales recorded in the Legendary Story Book and remembered in times to come. Only three will survive to have their stories written down, so the competition is fierce as they confront each other with their magical powers, but they only have one night to prove themselves worthy. This is the set-up for Equinox, a betting and bluffing, card placement game designed by Reiner Knizia, one of the board game hobby’s most prolific creators. That said, Equinox is more of a reimplantation of a reimplantation than a new design, though one which has been given a very attractive retheming. Mechanically, if not thematically, it is a redesign of Colossal Arena, published by Avalon Hill in 1997, which was itself a redesign of Grand National, published by Piatnik in 1996. So, the game has a bit of a history. Equinox itself, was published by Plan B Games, best known for titles such as Century Spice Road and Azul. It is designed to be played by between two and five players, aged ten and up, and can be played through in thirty minutes.

The very first thing that you are going to notice about Equinox is the quality of the components. The cards are large—2¾ by 4¾ inches—and the artwork is superb. The game’s stones, done in pastel colours, add a pleasing tactile feel and heft to the game, and the game even comes with nice little bags to store them in. (To be honest, this is the only thing the bags do, so they do feel superfluous.)

Equinox consists of one-hundred-and-ninety-nine cards, five cloth bags, and twenty-five stones. The cards break down in fourteen Champion cards, one-hundred-and-fifty-four Creature cards, eleven Chameleon cards, three Tree cards, six Row cards, and eleven Disappearance cards. The Champion cards represent the entrants in the competition, and consist of various animals and creatures, such as Squeak (mouse), Stag, Hoot (owl), Ursus (bear), Goatman, and so on. Each Champion has corresponding set of eleven cards in the one-hundred-and-fifty-four Creature cards, numbered from zero to ten. Each creature has a special ability, which is marked on their cards. The Chameleon cards are also numbered from zero to eleven, but do not have a corresponding Champion card. The Row cards, from zero to five, indicate the current round of the game. Their number also indicates the number of Prestige Points they will award the players who placed bets on the surviving Champions. The Disappearance cards are used to identify the creatures who have been eliminated from the game. The stones are used to indicate the players’ bets, each player being able to place a single bet per round.

Each round, the players will take it in turns to play Creature cards on the spaces in the current row underneath their Champion cards and place bets on the cards. A player can also reveal a secret bet made at the start of the game to gain control of a Champion, which allows him to trigger its special ability. At the end of each round, one Champion will be eliminated, so that by the end of the game, only three will have survived. The player who has earned the most Prestige Points from the bets he has placed on the surviving Champion is the winner. Bids placed earlier in the game are worth more than those placed later in the game.

Set-up is simple enough. Each player takes one set of stones and eight Champion cards are selected, either randomly or by choice. The six Row cards are laid out in a column, from zero at the top to five at the bottom. The selected Champion cards are laid out in a line in the top or row zero. They will be the Champions that the players will be betting on over the course of the five rounds. With fourteen Champions to choose from and only eight being used each time, Equinox offers a decent degree of replay value as it means different special abilities to try and activate over the course of the game. The Creature cards corresponding to the chosen Champion cards, the Chameleon cards, and the Tree cards are shuffled to form a single deck. Players then draw a hand of eight cards from this deck.

On each round, the players are playing cards and betting on the one row. A player’s turn has five phases. In the first, the player makes or reveals a prediction. In the first round, this can be an open prediction or a secret prediction, but can only be an open prediction in later rounds. A secret prediction is made on a Creature card from the player’s hand that he hopes will survive until the end of the game. It is placed face in front of him with a stone on top of it. If that Champion does survive to the end of the game, it is worth extra Prestige Points. An open prediction can be placed on a space or a card under a Champion in play, and once placed, no further predictions can be placed under that Champion in that row.

A player can also reveal his secret prediction. This can help him gain control of that Champion, though it means that the other players are more likely to try and eliminate that Champion.

A player can play one of three cards—A Creature card, a Chameleon card, or a Tree Card. A Creature card is placed in the row under the corresponding Champion and it can be played on top of another card. This will alter the strength of combined cards under the Champion, which is important in determining control if a Secret Bid is revealed, and it can activate a Special Ability if the player has control. A Chameleon card can be played on any space in a row and prevents the activation of any Special Ability if played, even if another Creature card is played. A Tree card is not played onto a row, but either forces the other players to reveal if they have made a secret prediction on a particular Champion or allows a player to take a previously played and visible card from any row.

The Special Abilities include drawing three cards for Squeak, retrieving a previously placed stone from any column—including for an eliminated Champion—for the Stag, and play a second card for the Twinz. There are a lot of Special Abilities and some of them are more useful than others.

Lastly, a player can discard cards from his hand, useful if he has cards in his hand for eliminated Champions, and draws back up. If all of the spaces in a row have been filled and one Creature card has the lowest value, its Champion is eliminated and the round ends, otherwise play continues until this happens. The game itself will end when either a Champion is eliminated on the fifth and final round or the deck is emptied.

Equinox is a game of betting and elimination and hoping that the Champion you are betting on is not going to be eliminated. When the Champion player is betting on is eliminated, it is likely to be devastating, because with it goes those bets and the possibility of Prestige Points and victory. It can lead to a player being knocked out of the game early because he cannot necessarily make up for the lost bets, so a player needs to be careful and not signal to the other players which Champion he is backing. Placing a Secret Bet at the start of the game can help with that as can taking control of a Champion if that Secret Bet has been revealed. Taking control of a Champion means that a player can potentially use the Special Ability for that Champion and with the right Special Ability it can give the player an advantage and even a way to counter the losses of backing an eliminated Champion.

However, once a Secret Bet and a potential player’s control of the Champion is revealed, it makes that Champion a target for the other players to eliminate. Also, not all of the Special Abilities are very useful. Further, if no Secret Bets are revealed, none of the Special Abilities will come into play. The likelihood is that only one or two Secret Bets are revealed and so equally, relatively few Special Abilities come into play. The difficulty with that is twofold. One is that sheer number of Special Abilities adds complexity because the players need to know what they are and what they do, despite coming into play infrequently. The other is that their use is an exception, meaning that the players have to look it up in the rules. (And even looking it up in the rules can signal to the other players that a player is about to do something.) It feels as if there should be a way of using the Special Abilities without having to reveal a Secret Bet.

Physically, Equinox is a gorgeous looking game. The artwork really is exquisite. The rulebook is easy to read and contains some good examples of play and scoring. There is an absolutely necessary guide to the Special Abilities on the back of the rulebook, though one per player would have been more useful. That said, the large cards mean that the game takes up a lot of space on the table and the bags, whilst nice, are a frippery too far.

Equinox is a great looking game and it is easy to see it origins as a horse betting game in which the players get to bet on the horses as they run the race and are left behind, one after the other (but hopefully not eliminated). Here though, beyond the core game play of placing bets and cards, it feels overdone in terms of its Special Abilities, that whilst seeming to add replay value, figure surprisingly infrequently during actual play and this makes them harder to teach and thus the game harder to teach and not quite as casual as it wants to be. Equinox is a decent game that will appeal to veteran players looking for a fast-playing cutthroat game of secrecy and bets, whilst for the casual player, its harder edge is hidden by its fantastic looks.

The Spice Must Flow

Published by Plan B Games, Century: Spice Road is a light, easy board in which the players are spice merchants on the spice road who trade spice back and forth in order to make the right sale. Each merchant begins play with some turmeric and the means to harvest more turmeric as well the ability to trade this turmeric up into other spices—safran, cardamom, and cinnamon. Eventually they will have the right combination of spices to make the right sale and thus acquire gold.

In fact, this is the very light theme to Century: Spice Road, a well-appointed game designed to be played by between two and five players, aged eight and up, which takes no more than forty-five minutes to play. The spice itself is represented by wood cubes, which are in ascending order of scarcity and value are yellow (turmeric), red (safran), green (cardamom), and (brown) cinnamon. The game comes with a plastic bowl for each of the four spices and the four bowls are placed in this specific order of scarcity and value. The game’s cards, all large, with full colour illustrations, and easy to hold in the hand, are divided into two categories. The first category of cards consists of Point Cards, which are purchased with the right combinations of spice and score a player Victory Points. The more difficult the combination of spices a Point Card requires to be purchased, the greater the number of Victory Points it awards a player. The second category of card is the Merchant Cards. These are broken down into further types—Spice Cards generate spice for a player; Upgrade Cards enable a player to change spice into a better spice, for example, turmeric to safran or safran to cardamom; and Trade Cards that enable a player to trade in spice for more or better spice, for example, two turmeric for two safran or one cardamom for two safran.

Game set up is simple. Each player receives some spice—the amount varies according to turn order—and the same two Merchant Cards. Each player also has a Merchant Caravan card where he can store his spice. The bowls of space are arranged in ascending order of value and scarcity. Five Point Cards are laid out face up in a row, with the game’s gold coins placed above the first Point Card in the row and its silver coins placed above the second card in the row. Six Merchant Cards are placed in a row below the Point Cards. Each time a Point Card is purchased or Merchant Card is taken, the line of cards is shuffled down and a new card is drawn to replace it.

On a player’s turn, he can take a single action, which can be one of four things. He can play a Merchant Card from his hand. This can be to generate more spice with a spice Card, to improve his spice with an Upgrade Card, or get more and better spice with a Trade Card. He can acquire a Merchant Card from the row. This can be any Merchant Card in the row, but on each of the Merchant Cards to the left of the one he wants to acquire, he must place a spice cube. The leftmost card is always free to take, but as players acquire the Merchant Cards they want to the right of this card, they fill the other cards up with spice and make them attractive options to acquire. He can claim a Point card by paying the right combination of spices. If there is gold or silver coin above the Point Card, the player also gets that. Lastly, he can rest. When a player plays a Merchant Card from his hand, it goes into his discard pile. By resting, a player can take the Merchant cards in his discard pile and put them back in his hand.

A game of Century: Spice Road lasts until one player has claimed his fifth Point Card—sixth in a two or three player game—and the round is completed. The player with the most points from a combination of Point Cards, gold and silver coins, and spice cubes other than turmeric wins the game.

Century: Spice Road is a very simple game and that simplicity gives it some interesting twists. By acquiring Merchant Cards, what each player is doing is building his own deck, but as a deckbuilder, Century: Spice Road is a very, very slow deckbuilder, with just one card being played from one turn to the next. It means that any engine to generate and improve spice a player develops ticks simply round whilst still giving him the flexibility to change his next action, whether that is to acquire a new Merchant Card or change his current objective because another has claimed the Point Card he wanted.

The limited number of possible actions and only having the one action per turn means that a player’s turn is short. Especially if a player spends his downtime working out what he wants to do. Ultimately, this makes a game play quickly and means that it is not a complex game.

Game play of course revolves around the Merchant Cards. Of these, the most popular type of Merchant Cards are the Spice Cards which generate spice and the Upgrade Cards which change spice into better spice. Yet they are not the most prevalent type of Merchant Cards. These are the Trade Cards that enable a player to trade in spice for more or better spice. Whilst some of these do help improve the types of spice a player holds, a great many allow the player to effectively trade down to give him more spice of a more common type. And more spice means that a player has more with which to Upgrade or Trade up. What this also means is that Trading down is as important as Trading up because having more spice gives a player more options and always ensures that he has spice to do things with. 

Physically, Century: Spice Road is handsomely presented. The cards are bright and colourful, the inclusion of plastic bowls to hold the spice cubes is nice, the wooden spice cubes and the gold and the silver coins in metal give the game a pleasing physicality, and the rules are covered on two sides of a smallish sheet of card. They are easy to read and pick up, so Century: Spice Road can be unpacked, the rules read, and a game begun in a surprisingly short amount of time. The simplicity of the rules also makes the game easy to teach.

Now Century: Spice Road has been compared to Splendor, published by Space Cowboys. The comparisons are not unfair, since they have similar mercantile themes and the need to collect resources to then trade up for better resources. Yet Century: Spice Road is not as cutthroat a game, not as tight, and a much more sedate game, even forgiving since it is easier to adjust to the changing strategies and objectives of your players. Whereas in Splendor, the players will often be competing for the same resources. This is not to say that Century: Spice Road cannot be like that—veteran gamers are likely to play it like this than family gamers are—but it is easier and more forgiving.

As easy a game as Century: Spice Road is, there are complexities to the play—the need to Trade down as much as up, for example—that do not quite make it suitable as a gateway game, like Carcassone, Settlers of Catan, or Ticket to Ride. It is not too much more complex than either of those three games, so it is perhaps a game to be played after a gateway game like one of them. 

Century: Spice Road offers solid play and challenges as a slightly longer filler for veteran players, but for a family audience or players looking for a lighter option, it is a thoroughly pleasing and enjoyable game. Either way, Century: Spice Road deserves a place on your gaming shelves and space on your table.