Century: New World Review

Ah, welcome trader to our New World. We have many, exciting, new products to trade with you! Have you heard tell of our fine tobacco? Only $2 a cube! Or what of pelts? Keep you warm on the voyage home. $15 a cube. And of course our finest product: cubed meat. We call it spam.

Players: 2-4
Time: 30-45 mins
Designer: Emerson Matsuuchi
Artist: Atha Kanaani, Chris Quilliams
Publisher: Plan B Games

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With somewhat muted fanfare, the final part of the Century trilogy arrives at our shores bringing promises of the New World. Its tale begins with Spice Road, a fine but flawed card driven engine builder. The far better Eastern Wonders swapped cards for tiles and a boat, sailing across the ocean. Now, we have worker placement.

A Brave New World

All the trappings of the previous games are here, present and correct. Collecting and swapping cubes to create sets to trade in for point cards. Now all those actions are spots on the board. Stick your tiny workers in the space and gain the reward, whether that is a new cube, a specific trade, or ‘upgrading’ cubes into the rarer colours. It is, however, worker placement with a slight twist, in that some spaces cost more workers and you can boot opponent’s workers out of a spot (to use it) if you put more workers in there. 

When you start to run out, you’ll spend a turn picking everyone back up, echoing Spice Road’s pick up your cards mechanic, but pleasantly opening up options for everyone else. It adds a nice element of phasing to the game, that is, being at a different point in your cycle in order to capitalise on other players picking up their workers. It is far from the first worker placement game to take this approach, but that makes it no less welcome here.

A worker placement game, however, moves all the action to the main board and largely removes the element of personal engine building that defined the original. So a much larger change has happened to the scoring cards: bonuses. Each card you take will open up new opportunities for you. The classic take a new worker is there, and you can end up with a large crowd of workers, but the multi-worker costs and the fairly tight board space means you can do just as well without extras. 

Many of the others refer to the types of spaces, giving you an extra cube or requiring one fewer worker when you visit a space with that symbol. It gives you a little bit of focus within the action selection. It raises interesting questions in following turns around whether to grab more of the same, to really specialise, or to diversify for a consistent return. It makes for a real decision around which scoring card to take beyond ‘I can afford this one’.

The subtler change to the scoring cards is that each only require 3 cubes instead of the 4 or 5 of the previous games, facilitating those decisions! It also has a surprising impact on the types of actions you will be taking: with so few cubes required you no longer need to be hammering the perfect combinations of trade actions, you can get a long way with just ‘take cubes’, especially with the right bonuses.

This change is reflected in the action spaces. Each resource has its own grab spot from the very start, whereas most of the trade spots are locked away. One of the objective card types lets you open up one of these spaces but they are rare, to the degree that you might play games where few appear, leading to very tight competition for spaces. This variability is definitely in its favour.

As if they needed more, one final layer of scoring card nuance is in the symbol in the top right corner. These symbols contribute to a set collection mini-game that is as arbitrary as it is important to provide a second avenue for scoring. Piles of wood-effect tiles sit in the scoring spots ready to be taken whenever you pick up a card. Each will have some two or three symbols and will score you points for each set you collect by game end. They are decidedly unexciting but ignoring them is not an option that will win you the game.

Cube trading was already painfully generic but in the previous releases it was at least coupled to an interesting, and novel, main mechanism. New World shoves its real novelty to the secondary mechanics: the engine building, set collecting, score cards. That just isn’t as attention grabbing. For my money, someone new to the series would be much better off picking up Eastern Wonders (which has just come out in the more thematically appealing Golem edition). But if you already have one or both of the previous games? Well then. We need to talk a bit longer.

Rating: Not New Enough

Spice World

Mixing in Spice Road adds two new sandy boards to the mix and a row of Spice Road trader cards. Your options just got bigger. The new worker placement board spaces let you either use the spice road card ability immediately, discarding it from the row, or (and here’s the clever bit) add it to your own little trade row of worker placement spots. Here you get a little more of that crafting your own engine thing of previous games, combined quite neatly into New World’s framework. 

There’s a neat puzzle element to it as well. The position in the trade row matters: to activate a card costs you as many workers as there are empty cards to the left. But you can take actions to swap the positions of cards in the row. It’s smart and adds just a little more options to make things interesting.

Rating: New World Order

New Wonders

Adding Eastern Wonders to the mix does, well, maybe exactly what you are expecting. It adds a splodge of tiles to the table (a smaller splodge than Eastern Wonders alone) and some worker placement spots to move your boat between the islands. Like Spice Road’s cards above, the islands give you far more trading opportunities and the same trading house building rules apply as in the previous game. Since getting houses out offers points by itself, engaging with this section of the game is harder to ignore. Indeed, you’re basically forced to since the set collection scoring tiles can only be obtained by clearing a column of trading houses from your player board. 

It’s good, though I can’t help but feel like the boat movement loses something by being driven by worker placement. You have a move 1 space or a move 2 spaces action spot, maybe a move to any tile (if the explore block gets removed). It makes that board less tense, less exciting, then its pure game. Nothing moves until someone goes out of their way to use an action spot, and then by and large we wait until the spots clear when someone rests. It feels disjointed, and secondary to the main board, even while you are near forced into it. It is still a fine puzzle. But doesn’t do anything cleverer than the two games apart.

Rating: Worldless

Spicy Eastern World

Here we are. The main event! The epic, table consuming combination we have waited 2 years to see! It is pretty good. It is not worth buying three £25 games especially to see. 

You end up with 6 worker placement boards in play: 3 standard New World cube gathering focused areas, two card grabbing Spice Road deserts, and a single boat moving board for Eastern Wonders. Indeed, the Eastern Wonders segment plays out exactly as it did in the section above. But now you don’t have to engage with it, you can also get set collection scoring tiles from the Spice Road area each time you collect a 4th card. This is immediately more interesting and renders EW/NW virtually obsolete if you own Spice Road.

Tragically, the most interesting part of the Spice Road/New World combo, the private trade row, is dropped before it has even a moment to flourish. Albeit, understandably. The worker placement is already loose enough without adding personal spaces to the mix. Instead, you simply use them as one shot powers. 

You get the choice here, to what degree you wish to focus on one section over the other. It really does feel like 3 sections, though. I think that is the price you pay for using worker placement as your glue: it is easy to integrate by simply adding some new spots, but those new spots always feel like their own independent area.

Entertainingly it is quite possible to get the balance wrong and completely fail to get any bonus scoring tiles. The combined game is challenging in the right way. It is cool to see it all come together without overwhelming you. But I have to admit, I’m playing it because Plan B has built something approaching a mythology around it. This is the last game in the trilogy! I have to see how the mechanical story ends… right?

Well, it ends exceedingly competently. But worker placement feels like they played it safe. And a game so shamelessly about trading cubes into other cubes in a dry historical setting can’t afford to play it safe with its core mechanics. The previous two games felt like they were doing something new. New World, ironically, is much the same as the old world.

Rating: Rounded Out

Our copy of Century: New World was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can pick up a copy for £33.99 RRP from your local hobby store.