Merlin Review
Merlin has arrived in Camelot!
We’re knights of the round table
We move wherever we’re able
We build buildings and fight villains
With timing quite impeccable
We dice well here in Camelot
We rolls ones and twos and threes a lot…
We’re knights of the round table,
Our scores are formidable, But many
times, We’re given cards,
That are quite incompletable
Tis’ a strange place…
Players: 2-4
Time: 75 mins
Ages: 14+
Designer: Stefan Feld, Michael Rieneck
Artist: Dennis Lohausen
Publisher: Queen Games
Merlin challenges our conceptions of how much randomness is allowed in a Euro game. Designer Stefan Feld has always been a fan of dice (see Castles of Burgundy, last year’s Oracle of Delphi) but Merlin has come under fire for going too far. Has it? What does too far even mean? Well, the central element of Merlin is the round table, effectively a dice based rondelle, or
Er… Ahem. The thing is while it’s certainly not Monopoly it is a roll and move game, a phrase that is the board game equivalent of “Dan Brown novel”. So how do Feld & Rieneck go about giving you decisions on your turn? The first step is to give you three dice for moving your Knight around the round table. Each round you’ll spend these to move your piece clockwise, taking the action of the space where you land. There’s no blocking, any number of knights are content to share a chair, it’s just that kind of court. So it is just a case of deciding what order to play your dice. It gives you some flexibility but you always end at the same final spot no matter what, and it only adds up to a single decision per round. After that you just… play it out.
More interesting is the white Merlin die every player also gets that allows them to move Merlin, a shared piece that not only gets you an extra action, he can be moved in either direction! A cute nod to his mythical ability to move through time. This is the main source of interaction in your turn by turn play. If he’s in a great spot for you, you want to move him immediately. Otherwise, you’ll be waiting to see where your opponents move him. There’s a reasonable amount of tension, or the occasionally amusing stand-off, around Merlin. Especially as his turns can be made twice as effective using your supply of magic staffs. I always keep a supply of magic staffs around for just such occasions.
When to play your Merlin Dice is a second decision. Your opportunity to make other decisions though, depend upon what you do and where you end up. As with most Euro games there is a plethora of components to collect. Some of these bits in Merlin allow you to manipulate your dice. The banners offer one use powers, some of which offer you alternative movement options like going backwards or leaping across the other side of the table (but not while the housekeeper is watching, thank you very much!) Apples are a particular source of power, letting you adjust a die to any face. This is of course the source of the English phrase “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” a reference to both their miraculous powers and their incredible rarity. It is easier, it turns out to just find the holy grail. In fact, this is exactly how you get them.
These options open up Merlin, giving you the ability to get to where you want to go, or to choose your path through the game. But they are a very limited resource that, once spent, leave you with no option but to follow the dice. This means the game will give you a wide spread of experiences, from frustrating turns where you don’t want to go where you’re forced, to turns where you have all the options and no idea where to go. Within that range though is a golden place, where you have a fixed goal in mind and need to hunt for the right combination of powers and resources to make it yours and that is where the game absolutely shines.
Imagine, if you will, needing to reach a particular space to get the final shield you need to defend your castle (which is something you’ll find yourself doing rather a lot, there’s a never-ending supply of nasty folk trying to get at your spam). Your dice aren’t working, but you could go to the brown province and get their standard. That lets you slide elegantly across the polished table to the space on the other side, where you can perhaps build a mansion. Building mansions is almost always good as they’re worth points but being in the right spot can net you a bonus resource, letting you take the shield you needed. And you’ve still got a die left to treat yourself with!
Rounds like that feel epic. But they don’t happen consistently without investment and it is all too easy to end up with either too few options or all the options and a lack of direction, and neither of those outcomes are good. The combination of control, luck and desire that influences your experience of any game occasionally, in Merlin, gives rise to fantastic rounds but it is a fragile equilibrium, determined by your available resources. The lack of direction in the game exacerbates this experience for new players.
You’ll get a pair of objective cards at the start of the game that ask you to collect a certain mix of components. Where in another game these would be something to focus on, here they are only worth a couple of points each. The hope is instead to set yourself up to score lots of these over the game, which you can do if you focus heavily on particular resource types and pick cards well. But that is far from apparent in your first game. Especially as you need to collect shields to defend your walls, you need to get in on the manor building business and you need to get out some influence in the 6 provinces to earn points that way. These all pull you in different directions where it is seemingly better to specialise. Especially as each resource type can be scored from a special chair at the table. Focus on collecting a lot of one resource and hit that spot as often as you can for chasing the really big scores, especially with Merlin and his staff.
At this point I feel like the game reaches its pinnacle. You always have a spot to aim for, you are constantly cycling and looking to round out mission cards and you are always faced with distractions of the other resources that you know you shouldn’t ignore. I just wish it wasn’t so easy to get trapped in the lowlands without any sense of control.
That is the main lesson from Merlin. You can get to a place of control, but because that control comes from consumable resources, and the structure of Merlin’s movement is as it is, you need to work much harder than in other similar euros to maintain that control. Once you have it, Merlin becomes as engaging and satisfying a Euro as any other. But you might instead spend more time being punished and frustrated, not so much by your opponents but by the system itself and that simply isn’t going to be to everyone’s tastes. For me, I know that I can enjoy playing it, and knowing how you can fail makes it that much more satisfying when it works, but it is never better than other games that succeed more consistently.
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