Jeremy’s Gaming Gratons: BAGHDAD: THE CITY OF PEACE
Board Game Gumbo is pleased to present another game night recap with Jeremy Dobler. This time, Jeremy gives us his first impression of Baghdad: The City of Peace, a new game from designers Fabio Lopiano and Nestore Mangone (who recently authored Gumbo favorite, Shackleton Base) and published by Alley Cat Games, with art by Roland MacDonald.
Got a test play of Baghdad in. There’s a very interesting action sequencing puzzle here.
On your turn, you’ll slide your card row, gaining benefits for any daytime card or adding them to your scoring pile for any nighttime card, if you meet the requirements of them as they slide off your board. If you don’t, however, the daytime card is just discard to no effect, and the nighttime card is removed from the game.
Then play a card into your card row, which gives you tags to work with for this next turn, first actioning any boat icons to move your boats down the river to hopefully dock them and lock in a scoring multiplier, but also stopping along the way to gain resources you might use later.
Next you move your Vizier within the city, either helping patients, taking scholars under your study, adding books to the library, collecting artifacts for your collection, building specialty buildings, or building up the great palace.
Curing patients gives you good to use towards building the palace; taking scholars gives you a 1 time use tag to be used on a future turn; adding the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th books to your board allows you to donate them to the library giving you resources, powerful extra actions, or tags; taking artifacts scores points based on the slot they are placed on or for end game scoring, but only if they are different types; constructing buildings gives you bonus actions at when your Vizier visits a quadrant of the board; and finally construction sections of the great palace both, makes you eligible to score VP in one of 4 categories at the end of the game, and gives you a small, but potentially powerful one time bonus.
To do any of these things you look at how many tags you have on your 3 played cards and take the token from the space you moved to, adding it to your player board of an equal or lower icon count. Sometimes this results in a bonus if you have 2-3 tokens vertically adjacent to each other.
But be careful because leaving yourself in a space that is adjacent along streets to either patients or scholars will cost you favor and/or money respectively. Lose too much favor and you gain shame tokens worth -3VP at the end of the game that you cannot get rid of.
Then you draw a card from the day or night card sections, and refill any empty city tile spaces and play passes to the next player.
After all day/night cards have been drawn, and the last player plays their final card from their hand, each player will assess whether they are eligible to score in up to 8 categories, before gaining VP based on the number of patients they saved, students they tutored, different artifacts they collected, books donated to the library, ships docked at ports, nighttime cards scored, architects sent to build the great palace, or buildings built.
It’s possible to score 0 on these, even if you did well in a category, simply because you never completed an action that lets you score one of those conditions.
Though you do have a few additional categories you’ll core regardless, like level 5 buildings, having constructed the top levels of the palace, your scores nighttime cards, different artifacts values on your board, remaining favor, before losing 3VP per shame tokens you have.
I’m excited to see how it plays at 3 and even 4 players.
Jeremy is an omni-gamer from Lafayette, Louisiana, who games at home with his wife and young son, but also can be frequently hosting or visiting game nights with friends all over Acadiana. Jeremy loves games about nature, IP games involving turtles and batmen, and games appropriate to play with his young son, but expect lots of different games discussed here each time. All photos courtesy of Jeremy Dobler.