Worker Placement

Carthage – long before the deadly conflict with Rome.
During 5 decades, each a game round, players use their servants to earn income or position them to obtain goods and load the goods onto incoming merchant ships - or even take the risk of chartering a private vessel - all with the goal of buying influence in the palace. Influence in the harbor can also determine where the best ships will dock, and the path of intrigue can provide yet another way into the palace courts. Only the player who develops the best business - through any means necessary - will end the game as the most influential senator.

Players control one of the great scientists during the 17th century Scientific Revolution in Europe. Use your limited time and energy to make discoveries, test hypotheses, publish papers, correspond with other famous scientists, hire assistants into your laboratory and network with other people who can help your progress. Discoveries follow historical tech trees in the key sciences of the age: Astronomy, Mathematics, Physics, Biology and Chemistry. The scientist who accumulates the most prestige will be appointed the first President of the Royal Society.

Once upon a time ...
1289. To strengthen the borders of the Kingdom of France, King Philip the Fair decided to have a new castle built. For the time being, Caylus is but a humble village, but soon, workers and craftsmen will be flocking by the cartload, attracted by the great prospects. Around the building site, a city is slowly rising up.

The players embody master builders. By building the King's castle and developing the city around it, they earn prestige points and gain the King's favor. When the castle is finished, the player who has earned the most prestige wins the game. The expansion Caylus Expansion: The Jeweller was included in the 2nd Edition.

Each turn, players pay to place their workers in various buildings in the village. These buildings allow players to gather resources or money, or to build or upgrade buildings with those resources. Players can also use their resources to help build the castle itself, earning points and favors from the king, which provide larger bonuses. Building a building provides some immediate points, and potentially income throughout the game, since players receive bonuses when others use their buildings. The buildings chosen by the players have a heavy impact on the course of the game, since they determine the actions that will be available to all the players.

As new buildings are built, they stretch along a road stretching away from the castle, and not all buildings can be used every turn. Players have some control over which buildings are active by paying to influence the movement of the Provost marker. The final position of the marker is the newest building that can be used that turn. The Provost marker also helps determine the movement of the Bailiff marker, which determines the end of the game. Generally, if players are building many buildings and the Provost is generous in allowing them to be used, the game ends more quickly.

In Viticulture, the players find themselves in the roles of people in rustic, pre-modern Tuscany who have inherited meager vineyards. They have a few plots of land, an old crushpad, a tiny cellar, and three workers. They each have a dream of being the first to call their winery a true success.

The players are in the position of determining how they want to allocate their workers throughout the year. Every season is different on a vineyard, so the workers have different tasks they can take care of in the summer and winter. There's competition over those tasks, and often the first worker to get to the job has an advantage over subsequent workers.

Fortunately for the players, people love to visit wineries, and it just so happens that many of those visitors are willing to help out around the vineyard when they visit as long as you assign a worker to take care of them. Their visits (in the form of cards) are brief but can be very helpful.

Using those workers and visitors, players can expand their vineyards by building structures and planting vines (vine cards) and filling wine orders (wine order cards), players work towards the goal of running the most successful winery in Tuscany.

King Solomon presided over a golden age of peace and prosperity in ancient Israel. During this time Solomon instituted an unprecedented building program. As one of Solomon's chief governors, you must procure materials and oversee construction of buildings and roads across the land for the glory of Solomon. You will also help to construct the Temple, one of the wonders of the ancient world.

Kingdom of Solomon is a worker-placement game with a few new twists and turns. Do you claim a resource space, an action space or throw in all your remaining pawns to grab a powerful Bonus Space? Will you spend your resources to extend Solomon's kingdom, take some points in the Market or add to the Temple? These and many other choices await you in this highly interactive game.

You play Kingdom of Solomon in rounds of four phases. You start the round placing your pawns to get resources, take actions or get a bonus. In this placement phase players take turns, each placing one pawn at a time. After all pawns have been placed, players resolve what they get from placing their pawns. This is called the resolution phase, and each player, in turn, resolves the placement of all their pawns before the next player. Next the players can go to the Market to sell or buy resources. In this market phase, like the placement phase, players alternate taking turns, except that players take turns in reverse order. The last shall be first, and the first shall be last. Finally, you build in the building phase. Players, one at a time, can build a building, roads and add blocks to the Temple.

When you place pawns to take actions, you can get an additional resource for a resource space, trade one resource for another, steal a resource from an opponent, get victory points or draw Fortune cards. You can play Fortune cards at any time. Fortune cards provide resources, victory points or special actions. Bonuses your pawns can gain for you include one of every resource, three Fortune cards or victory points with a rearrangement of turn order so you become the new first player.

You use resources to build things. Each thing costs a specific set of resources. The buildings you build give you victory points and additional spots to place pawns for resources or actions. Roads link resource spaces into resource regions so you can get more resources per pawn placed in the resource region. Building Temple blocks give you either victory points or temple tokens that help you gain or keep the High Priest. The High Priest lets you take advantage of another player’s resource region and gives you victory points at the end of the game.

The game ends at the end the round when a player places all his building tokens on building sites, there is a building token on each of the building sites, or the Temple is complete. The player with the most victory points wins.