Reviews

This is a great worker placement/resource management/area control game. It does a fantastic job in mixing these different genres of games into one. You are collecting resources to build buildings and then you place them in any one of the five district that have not yet built that specific building. Each building will give you a different benefit and some buildings have an additional benefit if you hire a gnome to work in that building. There are 3 scoring rounds in which you will score points based on the number of buildings you control compared to everyone else in each district. So if you have 3 buildings in one district and the next person has 2 in the same district, you will score 5 points for having the most in the district and the next player will score 3 for having the second most, 1 point for third, etc... Even a two-player game of Belfort is competitive because in a 2-player game you will have two "dummy" players who vie for control of the districts as well. The catch-up mechanism is great in that the player(s) who are in the lead will have to pay more in taxes according to the score track. After three scoring rounds the winner is the one with the most points.