This particular little Euro released in 2010 to considerable acclaim picking awards like the 2010 Meeple’s Choice Awards, Swiss Gamers Award and International Gamers Award, just to name a few. It’s gotten considerably good support from Board Game Geek sitting pretty on the tail end of the top 20 but more importantly for me personally it came highly recommend by several friends as a really great, fast, yet deep strategic card game.

It’s a game that has been on my “must play” list for nearly five years, that’s quite a bit longer than I like to wait to review a game, but there are so many games these days and only so much time and wallet one can dedicate to gaming. In any case, I finally got to play it, so here is your review of 7 Wonders!

7 Wonders is a strategic card game about building Wonders of the World. In essence it’s a sort of drafting game where you go through 3 ages of ever improving cards constructed into decks representing each age. The cards of each deck in each age are distributed among the players and you effectively pick a card to play into your play area, than pass it to your neighbor. When all the cards have been played the age is over and you move on to the next age, there are three ages in the game. It’s a point scoring game and there are a wide variety of ways to score points, the winner of the game is of course the person who scores the most points at the end of the game. Each card represents some sort of advantageous building or effect, many of which give you access to the all-important resources and gold you need to build the wonders each player has in their player area chosen at random at the start of the game.

 

There are a number of pretty interesting effects and mechanics that make up the whole of the strategic play and while the pick and pass mechanic is simple, the choices you have to make are not. Simply put, whatever you don’t choose someone else can get, while simultaneously anything you play into your own play area might later help your opponents as many buildings allow players to gain advantages based on what their neighbors have constructed. It’s essentially a tug of war, you build what you need, while trying to deny your opponents what they need and avoiding building things that could help them later on. You want to get your wonder built as quickly as possible as it typically scores you points, earns you money and sometimes has some sort of beneficial game-play effect as well as freeing you up so you can focus on building other advantageous point scoring buildings.

There are other mini effects in the game, for example at the end of each age there is a battle that takes place between you and your neighbors on your right and your left of you. The winner of these battles is the player who raised the bigger military (red cards with combat strength) and you gain points for each victory in increasing values as the ages go up. There are many little “quirks” of point scoring in the game which force you to think about how the game is going on the whole for everyone, so you’re not only concerning yourself about what your building but what your opponents are building and how that compares to you and each other.  Most of the interaction between players comes in this form, which is to say, the interaction is pretty minimal.

This game reminds me a great deal of Race for the Galaxy in that, players are all doing their own thing, but you’re keeping a close eye on what your opponents are doing because their choices can open up strategic options for you. For example a player builds a building that produces wood, so you counter by building a trade building that allows you to buy that wood from them cheaply. With access to an additional wood you might be able to complete a more difficult building later on, which in turn earns you an advantage like earning points off of certain types of cards your other neighbor played. It can get pretty tricky, decisions can be tough and even a single mistake can put you at a big disadvantage. You would think with such a simple mechanic as pick a card and pass, the game would move quickly but people get hung up on tough decisions quite frequently.

I can’t say I was blown away by the game, but card games rarely ever blow me away as the mechanics of card games are often quite toned down compared to board games and 7 Wonders is no exception. I think it’s a clever game and at about 30 to 45 minutes regardless of how many players you have  it’s a pretty fast game with plenty of strategy and tough decisions to be made, all the marks of a good game. There was nothing in the game that stood out for me, either negative or positive that is worth mentioning, though I can understand it’s popularity but as I suspected (and perhaps it is the reason it took so long to get it played) it’s not really my type of game. At least it’s nothing I plan to put into my collection, though I have absolutely no objection to playing it, it’s a fine Euro.

It has quality components and it does avoid some of the designer pacing problems many such card games have, it’s clear the impact of the streamlining movement in board and card games has been used to good effect here. There was much more that could have been added to the game that would have been unnecessary, it’s focused and to the point and that’s what you want out of a solid Euro card game. In fact I found that the expansions seemed to be mostly unnecessary burdens on the game, for example the Leaders expansion added another type of deck that is used in the game and while interesting and certainly not overwhelming, It really didn’t alter the game a whole lot. It just added “one more thing”. I suppose for fans of the game this would make for a good expansion, but I didn’t really see any reason for its addition, it didn’t improve the game in any meaningful way.

It’s become common practice now to use heavy iconography in card games and 7 wonders makes good use of this approach, in fact, having mentioned Race For The Galaxy as a comparison this game had a lot of the same sort of complexities mechanically but the Iconography made it a lot easier to understand than in Race for the Galaxy, which really helped the game a great deal. It’s less of a bear to teach than Race as a result.

The art style is rather bland, in particular given the subject matter which offers a great opportunity to really embellish. I’m not entirely sure the theme came through particularly strong in the mechanics and it got little help from the art, so to me it felt more like a point scoring game with clever mechanics rather than a game about building wonders of the world. In fact the only thing that gives you the impression of “wonders” are the stock player boards with the actual wonder your building, the only place where the art rose out of acceptable into the pretty. Had they taken the opportunity to use the same attention to the art on the cards, you might have squeezed more thematic presence at least visually into the game.

I can only conclude that like many Euro games, I like it enough to not have any objection to playing it but it’s nothing I feel the urge to add to my collection. It’s certainly not as clever as Race For The Galaxy which remains one of the few Euro card games in my collection, but it certainly is a lot easier to teach and learn.