Century Spice Road Review

“Hey kid, you wanna score some brown?”

“What d’ya want for it?”

“Two green.”

“Huh yeah right!”

“Ok, ok, how’s about I throw in some yellow too? I know you can trade that up over Eastside.”

“Alright, two green.”

“Pleasure doing business with you.”

Players: 2-5
Time: 30-45 mins
Ages: 8+
Designer: Emerson Matsuuchi
Artist: David Richards, Fernanda Suárez
Publisher: Plan B Games, ABACUSSPIELE, Arclight, Asmodee, Broadway Toys LTD, Cube Factory of Ideas, Devir, Mandoo Games, Piatnik

 

---

Century: Spice Road is a game of cubes and beautiful cards, metal coins and plastic bowls. It’s an engine builder but in an accessible package. All these elements combined have led to whispered suggestions that Century might be a Splendor killer! Splendor is a game of beautiful cards and even more wonderful poker chips. An engine builder in an accessible package. It is still one of my favourite gateway games, so can the upstart Century really spice things up enough to supplant Splendor from my creaking shelves? Let’s find out.

Ah, the spice road. The legendary journey across continents bring spices from the East to the delicate taste buds of the west. The traders that braved this epic journey did so for one, perfectly understandable, reason: victory points. Now, so can you! Although without the awkward, tiring work of actually travelling.

You start out as a new trader who has gotten their hands on some turmeric, probably off the back of a lorry, and you’re looking to shift it fast. For now you have just two card shaped allies: one who’ll grab you two more turmeric when played (“Jesus Larry, we’ve already got more turmeric than we can shift I don’t want more!”) and one who, through knowledge of dark chemistry, can level up your spice to its evolved form…

I choose you, Cardamon!

Spice, you see, has a clear and well established hierarchy. Turmeric is the worst, it stains literally everything yellow, even things you’ve never let it near. But when it grows up, turmeric becomes Saffron, a red spice famous for costing a lot of money in supermarkets. But there’s still two more levels! Cardamon is a mysterious spice whose green pods somehow finds its way into takeaway rice to ambush you with weird flavours, and Cinnamon, or sweet wonderful cinnamon, is the key to many a great baked good and as such takes its rightful spot in the top bowl.

Each is represented by a different colour of cube but through poor work on the part of the publisher, the colour selection seems designed to make the game unplayable by those with the most common forms of colour blindness. Red, green and brown are literally the worst choices they could have made. Your objective, to trade in certain combinations of cubes for victory points according to the demands of contract cards, only exacerbates this problem.

Century: Spice Road buries the thematic journey between markets under the board gaming equivalent of a cinematic wipe. Turns take mere moments and the game rattles around smoothly even at 5 players. Your options are suitably simple. Trade in spices for a VP card, play one of your trader cards to use it, pick up all your played trader cards, or buy a new one from the spice road personal column. One trader looking for a spicy relationship.

While I’ve introduced you to your starting pals, the vast majority of the cards you can hire neither gain you specific new spices nor simply upgrade them. Almost every other card you get will convert some set of spice cubes into another set, perhaps taking two saffron and turning them into a cinnamon and a few turmerics. Or turning a cinnamon into a host of lesser spices. These traders are the pistons of your spice conversion engine, driving you towards victory. Or points at least.

But the secret to Century is not in any given card, it is in how you use your cards together. Turning the output of one trade into the input of the next, carefully constructing an engine to let you cycle through the spice types faster than your opponents so that you may get hold of the precious victory point cards first. Helping and challenging you in this quest for efficiency is how playing a trade card let’s you perform that trade any number of times. So if you’ve set yourself up right, that one cinnamon trade in can be used on your entire cinnamon stash at once. Super effective.

Where Century makes things difficult though is in the opportunities it allows you. You can have the most perfect trading engine in the world but the victory point cards demand specific combinations of spice cubes, inevitably forcing you to use your engine sub-optimally to build up the right mix, or to gut it of fuel to pay for the cards. Each VP purchase potentially leaves you floundering for a few turns as you try and get things firing anew. You are forced to decide how much spice reserve to build up before you grab those VPs.

Obligatory Spice Must Flow Heading

Century Spice Road does two more interesting things to keep you thinking. VP cards always refill from one side, at the other are a few metal coins, worth bonus points when you take the card beneath them. You are encouraged to aim for these cards and, if you collect to some other target, encouraged to wait for that card to slide right into those bonus spots as other players take those cards. These bonuses can make all the difference in a tight game.

The second is when hiring new traders. The card furthest from the deck is free, but any others require you to drop any spice cube onto each card you pass over. You want to wait for good cards to get cheaper, but you don’t want to risk other players grabbing them first! It’s an excellent mechanism, especially in higher player count games where the pressure is that much higher. Furthermore, those spice cubes stay out on the cards for whoever hires them, a potential bonus and sometimes reason enough to take a card from that market. This is a dramatic improvement over the sometimes dumb luck market that Splendor had.

Unfortunately this is the limit to the player interaction in this game, and that can cause problems. There is nothing to hold back a player with a better engine than you and the game lasts long enough for you to be made painfully aware of your own deficiencies. Unlike Splendor, Century doesn’t accelerate towards some conclusion. It is structured around the gaining of individual VP cards and that leaves the fifth, game ending card feeling rather similar to the first, or at least the second one you claim. Contrast this to Splendor where your final few turns are the clear culmination of your actions throughout the game.

The difference between Splendor and Century is fundamental in nature. The strategy in Century is that of “process”. You are attempting to create a process through the cards you buy that will convert your spices to the ones that will ultimately earn you victory points. Splendor’s strategy is “visual”: the specific elements you collect, the gem cards, by themselves make your engine more efficient. By looking at your tableau in Splendor you know your engine’s capabilities. This makes it far more accessible to new players.

A card in Century, on the other hand, is only as effective as the context within which it is played. This makes it harder for new players to fully grasp, and makes it the deeper game, but it has what I consider to be some unfortunate consequences. Most importantly, players typically have their entire engine set up, bar the odd tweak, by the mid point of the game. The trader market, which is so interesting to begin with, is hardly used for the last half. This, combined with the lack of player interaction, results in the game predominantly being determined by that half way point, even if the game does a good job of obfuscating this, and offering up some decent decisions with regards to which VP cards you go for.

Century is a more advanced feeling Splendor, but for me I’m not sure it’s the better one. It offers a bit more meat in the early game, but ultimately squanders it in a repetitive second half where you just run your engine through multiple times. While a fully firing engine is immensely satisfying, it’s only satisfying that first time, and doesn’t need repeated emphasis. A drag race is only ran over a short straight for a reason. But between closely matched players, Century is elevated. Those tight decisions over compromising your engine for points really count and there Century has the opportunity to shine throughout its play length. It is a very clever design but, I feel, needs the right combination of players to make the most of.

 

Rating: Unbelieva-bowl

 

 

So I bought my own copy of Century Spice Road… and then also received a review copy  from Esdevium Games, so… You can pick it up from your local hobby store for £34.99 RRP.