A Review of Thieves Guild
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Players: 2–4
Designed by Dominique Garay, Adam Tozser
Reviewed on 3/1/2010 |
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| Buy It Now! | More Info | |
Thieves Guild is one of those fantasy-themed games that is difficult to classify right off the bat. Unlike the vast majority of fantastical games occupying shelves around the world, here is one that doesn’t involve sprawling maps, the raising of armies, delving dungeons, or even mentions the word “dragon” anywhere. Instead it is revealed right on the box that this is a strategy game based on the skill of thievery. Playing the game reveals that indeed, many of mechanisms and in-game triggers are pretty darn unique even amidst a totally saturated marketplace. Thievery, in this case the capture and safe-return of goods and items to one’s home base is offset by patrolling bounty hunters who want nothing more than to arrest (or better yet, eliminate) these pesky thieves running around the city. The balance of power is a bit biased at times but the game is written to intelligently (and naturally) counteract many of these unbalances but I will cover these things in greater detail farther along into this critique. For now, let’s begin by reviewing the hard facts of the game.
Released back in 2003 by Iron Sun Games, Thieves Guild represents the first (and at present, only) game on the company’s roster. Developed by Dominique Garay and Adam Tozser, the game is designed for 2-4 players at a suggested age level of 10 & up.
The fairly large box contains a rather robust and nicely decorated game board with an outer-ring & inner city section, four 12-sided dice, and a whole lot of cardboard! Chits, character pawns, fate & assassin cards, coin tokens, gold and silver bar icons, spells, weapons, and player stat cards are all cardboard cut-out which is certainly passable considering the above-average artwork each contains. I bring this up only because players spoiled by the plastic sculpts of Fantasy Flight or Rio Grande’s distinctively European wooden bits may be a bit surprised at the abundance of card stock here. Of course the good news is that lower production costs are what make the game much more affordable than fantasy titles from the abovementioned manufacturers.
Once you finish popping out the hundreds of small chits, the game’s 28-page rulebook begins to demand your attention in a subliminal but unmistakable way. I’ll just cut right to the chase and say that while the rules contain all of the necessary information to get underway, they are written and sorted in a manner that requires several reads and near-constant reference during the initial session of play.
The game’s mechanic, reduced to its absolute simplest summation, is that of cops and robbers/ lock and chase action. The players choose between being either a guild of thieves from various races or the troop of bounty hunters set on eliminating the threats to the city. Oddly enough, the three available guilds are human, elf, and orc, which is a bit erroneous considering classic mythology tells us that an elf who succumbs to evil is in fact an orc. As such having both thieving elves and orcs is a bit redundant. In this reviewer’s opinion, the three thief races of choice should have been humans, orcs, and trolls, as even the artwork coincides with this alteration perfectly but I digress, a minor consideration amidst the greater tasks at hand.
The game is won by one of two ways: Be the first guild to amass 50 coins (and deposit them safely to home base), or two: collect 100 coins as the bounty hunters. Technically there are a few more ways to win as well: be the last man standing on the board or by arresting two thieves from each guild (again if you’re the bounty hunters).
I began by stating the most common method of winning is through coin collecting and there are several ways to accomplish this. Items can be bought and sold on the black market for profits (pretty neat concept), shops within the city can be sacked, eliminating rivals allows a player to keep the items they were carrying, and finally there is the ever-present “fate” cards that can offer tasks and opportunities to earn additional coins. I should note that the bounty hunters have a slightly different scoring method in that arresting thieves allows them to keep what the thief was carrying and at the beginning of the second phase of play each time, the bounty hunters collect a coin from each building within the city that wasn’t sacked.
Play itself is broken down into 4 phases (action, move, action, combat/ sacking) for each of the 4 pawns within a player’s guild. Essentially the player’s turn isn’t over until they’ve done the four phases for each of their four characters. 16 courses of action make for pretty lengthy turns, especially early on while still fumbling to comprehend the game’s mechanics.
The board break down is structured so that the outer track is a simple “roll & do the action required” affair and is used mostly to collect supplies, trade goods, and to hire assassins. This area of the board also contains the thieves’ guilds (which are basically safe havens for the characters but also where coins must be deposited to no longer be considered “carried”).
The inner section, the city of Ladroness, is where the action awaits. Here there are businesses to potentially sack, purchase items legitimately, or get into combat situations with the bounty hunters (technically this can happen anywhere on the board but it’s here that they will attempt to stop the thieves vigorously).
Finally, there are magic items and enchantments that can be collected along the way to give the players a bit of an edge, particularly in combat but occasionally in movement benefits. Combat itself is a dice rolling affair where players must match or beat the combat rating listed on each of their stat sheets, which is essentially the same dynamic used in sacking a shop (except that it’s the agility stat that must be bested). In most situations, both players are allowed an opportunity to strike (even if the aggressor’s strike proved fatal believe it or not). The retaliatory roll makes it possible for both combatants to fall in combat, which is rare, but definitely possible.
With a basic understanding of the game’s structure, it’s off to the city of Ladroness to steal or be captured. Again the fact that turns are really quite lengthy comes to bite the game’s pacing almost immediately. The player who starts goes through their 16 events and like I said before, prepare to be referring to the manual as if you were trying to disarm a ticking bomb! Movement on the outer track is determined by a die roll while movement in the city is free but limited to 4 spots, unless your bounty hunter has the lion’s head symbol, in which case they are allowed 7 spaces per move. Access to the city is limited to only to the main gates for the bounty hunters while thieves can use the gates or the thief’s tunnel. Magic items can be used once but remember that each character can carry only one at a time. Each store within the city has its own rule set when it comes to sacking and the payout varies for each as well. What this all means in English is that the book will be coming out of the box nearly constantly. Not a crime alone but the way it’s structured makes looking things up for quick reference quite a chore. While the book includes a few pages that serve as reference sheets, my friends and I found that we had to make-up our own that actually contained the information we really needed to keep the game moving along.
In all honesty, there is quite a bit to keep sorted here and it’s not all that intuitive either. Little things like when’s the appropriate time to use items or whether certain moves would even be possible crop up very often that the rulebook simply makes no reference of either way.
Another problem is the game’s struggle to find balance between the thieves and the bounty hunters. In truth, every time I’ve played we noticed a definite trend of nobody being willing to be the bounty hunter. While the thieves are busy buying and selling, sacking and looting on each lengthy turn sequence, the bounty hunters are typically simply using their turns moving in effort to chase down or head-off the thieves. Even when the stars align and you are able to commit a thief into battle, there is hardly an advantage to being the elite guard. In other words, and this is especially true with the orcs, it was just easy to come away the loser of such an encounter.
To remedy this situation, the game is designed so that two bounty hunters working in unison have the ability to arrest a thief (as opposed to eliminating them entirely). Of course since all but one of the bounty hunters are limited to 4 movements maximum within the city, it’s often a frustrating challenge of logistics in getting a successful team up to occur.
So bad is this whole dynamic that I really can’t recommend playing the game with only 2 players. My opponent and I found it actually wiser to simply each be a thief guild and to split up the bounty hunters to 3 apiece in effort to stop the other one’s thieves. It’s certainly an improvement to one being the thieves and the other the hunters but it’s still a far cry from the game’s best moments, which are definitely formed in the 3 or 4 player options.
Once in a great while, everything clicks and theirs a bit of the game’s brilliant promise shows through. Nearly every angle has been considered and accounted for and there are some really cool innovations (like a black market with fluctuating prices) that deliver on the game’s potential but in all, the experience simply doesn’t come together well.
I don’t like to place too much stock on pacing, but have to again consider that the game’s biggest flaw could very well be the cobby manner in which each turn is carried out. While more players seems to make the game itself more fun, sometimes the waiting process while everyone else takes their turn can be quite tedious (especially for the bounty hunter).
Additionally a bit too much of a player’s success or failure comes down to rolls of the dice. Magic items and weapons can take some of the weight off this reality but at the end of the day, it’s really a whole lot of rolling and hoping for the best.
In conclusion, it’s rather difficult to recommend Thieves Guild to all but the most compulsive fantasy-game collectors. It succeeds in just about every area except arguably the most important one: Being fun to play. The task of winning feels more laborious and tedious than it does exciting and achievable. I’ve found the play dynamic to be cobby, overly complex, counterintuitive, and sometimes downright frustrating when the whole system seems to be working against you. Again having more players seems to add a degree of randomness and much-needed chaos to the formula but the game’s foundation is a bit too fundamentally flawed to fully benefit there either. If chase and be chased and dice rolling combat float your boat, then by all means give this title a shot. The artwork and uniqueness of the game certainly more than cover the cost of admission but for everyone else there are countless games out there that are simply more refined and more enjoyable to play.
~Jason Rider
