1-4 Players
Designers: S. J. MacDonald, Shem Phillips
Artist: Mihajlo Dinitrievski
Publisher: Garphil Games
About the Game
We have the second game on Garphil’s third trilogy, this time about transcribing knowledge from all around the world. As usual it’s hard to follow up a great first game in Wayfarers, so how do Scholars fair?
Gameplay
On your turn, you either play a card or rest. To play a card, you chose one of the actions on you board and play a card and 1-2 dice. The dice will not only determine the value of the action, but also the color. Some actions care about just value, some just color, some both. Primary color dice will also combine color to secondary ones. Each dice can also be modified by up to two works to either change their color or to improve its value. There are less actions this time, mainly getting more translators, adding scrolls to be translated and translating them, and going up on the different scientific tracks.
When you rest, you rest, you get the income of all the cards you play. Those are either getting some dice or activating the income of one of the tracks. This dynamic makes the timing of acting and resting really interesting.
Solo Gameplay
As usual, we have a dedicated solo board, and it uses the 2 color system that Wayfarers used. This 6 card solo deck means that the AI is just interested in getting translators and dealing with scrolls, ignoring the science tracks. However, it still feels like a realistic, though abstracted, opponent.
One big difference is that we don’t have “personalities” this time around, but difficulty levels. I appreciate that route, as it would be difficult to isolate or incentivize too much one aspect.
Components
This is a standard Garphil production, with all the good stuff that comes with it. Great art, great components, lots and lots of symbols but a pretty good rule book with a back dedicated to symbology. It also uses all the familiar components, with the little flag for tracks, asterisks for influence and lots of familiar symbols.
One aspect I think they did great is accessibility. For a game that uses color as one of its central mechanisms, I believe that the way the symbols of the primary and secondary colors differ on more than just color, and the color of the dice and pips were chosen make this fairly color blind friendly. I’m no expert in the matter though.
Conclusion
Scholars feel smaller in scale, but that is actually a good thing. All systems in Scholars feel tighter and more connected. When comparing to Wayfarers, Scholars felt a bit more intuitive though no less of a challenge to optimize.
There is not much to criticize here. It’s what you expect from SJ and Shem, but it feels like a step towards a cleaner and less comborific fashion. And it works really well.
Score: 9.5/10
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