LogFAQs > #965737035

39. Century Eastern Wonders

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/242574/century-eastern-wonders

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Point-to-point navigation, resource management, order fulfillment
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 45-60 minutes
First played: 2018
Experience: 4-6 plays with 3-4 players

The second in a Century trilogy, Eastern Wonders has you controlling a spice merchant navigating Asian isles via boat, laid out in hexes. Each turn, you get some movement points and send your boat to different hexes, and on each hex you land on, you can place an outpost, gather spices, or trade spices (with the game). The trades you can execute depend on the hex that you land on. Placing certain trading posts gets you special rewards, and you trade your collected spices to fulfill orders and gain victory points.

Century Spice Road, the first of the Century games, is one of my favorite gateway games. It gets you quickly into the action by acquiring cards, and then you just run your engine with your head down.

Eastern Wonders complicates things by introducing a spatial element. You have to plan your route to sequence where you harvest your yellow spices and where you upgrade them to the next tier (of which there are four), or when you hit upon that perfect sequence of upgrades. And then you have to plan your route to race your boat to the corners of the map. In the meantime, everywhere you land, you should be trying to plan out which upgrades you can unlock on your board.

It's a pretty fun puzzle - trading spices for other spices is just kind of inherently satisfying. But at the same time, the races it introduces feel tight in a way that isn't that intentional in terms of player interaction, and it's a fair bit more difficult to discern your opponents' capabilities of grabbing certain objectives. So to me, there's more aimless milling about in the center of the map - obviously less satisyfing. Still, it's fun to slowly get more powerful, to watch the board fill up beautifully, and to finally get those objective tiles for VP, because they do take so much effort. I just wish the satisfaction-to-work ratio were a little higher!