First Look at Troyes

Does anyone care about my thoughts on Troyes? It’s a game that’s old enough in gaming terms that its artwork is contextually appropriate. So what do first impressions in the year of our Lord 2019 add to proceedings? Well, it’s exactly that first play experience that felt so unusual to me.

Troyes is a game of dice drafting and action selection with a smattering of worker placement type mechanics. It’s solid. Long, especially with 4 newbies, but happily engaging. I enjoyed it! But it seems to do something interesting with it’s scoring. It manages to be both miserly tight-fisted and wildly generous. Like a sweet shop where you can only ever get one sweet at a time.

There are points available for lots of things. Building the cathedral, resolving events, interring your workers in a trade, having lots of stuff (although exactly which stuff is a question to plague you throughout the game!) They are not hard to do either, most requiring just an action to get your hands on, and yet it somehow feels like getting blood from a stone!

I should say at this point that this is a good thing! It stands out and, I’d say, fits the setting of a medieval city. That sense of difficulty in making things happen. Even if you are a noble, and actually have relatively easy access to basic resources. This is no Agricola-like starving peasants mechanic!

So if resources aren’t necessarily tight, and points appear to be available across the board, where does this sense of unusual challenge come from? Some easy answers first of all: the vast majority of point rewards are low value and end scores appear to be in the 40-50pt range instead of the 100-200 range of so many other Euros. Secondly the tightness is not so much about resources as it is about the dice selection mechanic that is the unique and excellent heart of the game. You always need to spend dice to take actions and you can always spend money to buy other player’s dice out from under them. It can get quite delightfully vicious at times.

More importantly, it’s in the question of relative efficiencies. Troyes offers a wealth of questions about how to most efficiently do what you want to do. Most actions can be powered up by using two or three dice at once, but that will cost money. You can spend influence to gain more workers or adjust dice values and since most actions require (or reward) higher values of dice you are certainly encouraged to do what you can to boost what you play.

There is a fascinating interplay of immediate, tactical opportunism and longer term play that are both under pressure from your opponents stealing the dice you need. This sets it apart from so many modern Euros who allow you more space to play and rewards you handsomely for it. I think most recently of Coimbra here where the fun, interactive dice system ultimately still leaves you with enough options and rewards that the interaction losses it’s bite. Nothing in Troyes feels necessarily better than anything else, and yet there are many opportunities to get small edges that ultimately might win you the game. Especially if you can use them to their fullest extent.

Unless, apparently, you are me! Guess I’ll just have to troy harder next time.