Print books, add refinements and upgrade your machinery to fulfill the orders of your customers and exceed your patron’s expectations!
1-4 players, ages 10+
Playing time: 60-120 minutes
Designers: Katarzyna Cioch & Wojciech Wiśniewski
Artwork: Rafał Szłapa
Publisher: Granna
https://www.granna.pl/en/
In Gutenberg everyone is playing as a printing pioneer and runs their own 15th century printing house. Over the course of 6 rounds players will bid by secretly placing cubes in their initiative board to determine the player order: actions are performed in order from the player with the most markers to the player with the fewest markers.
These actions allow you to create new orders, purchase ink, develop your specialties or improve your printing house. The final action allows players to take a Patronage card when they meet its depicted requirements, or when they don’t they can choose one of the available rewards such as an extra order, ink, money, or specialty.
Once players are ready performing actions, they earn money, points and other rewards by fulfilling orders: players need to own the depicted letter tokens but keep them for future rounds, while ink tokens are used up and returned to the bag. In addition you can earn additional rewards when some of your specialties are developed to a certain level.
After 6 rounds, players receive additional points for collected Patronage cards, specialties developed to level 4 or higher, and leftover money. The printing house with the most fame wins the game!
Gutenberg is a light-medium eurogame with very streamlined gameplay: fulfilling orders, managing your resources and money, and developing tracks of different specialties to unlock bonuses and endgame points; a couple of things we’ve seen in other games before are combined in an excellent way. The bidding for actions on the initiative boards works great and definitely reminds me a lot of ‘Fresco’, which uses a similar mechanism.
What’s really special are the rotating gears that allow you to combine bonuses, and the wooden letter markers that look simply amazing and are easily my favorite board game components of the year!
Tabletopping 