A love letter to the viscount

🏰 Viscounts of the West Kingdom might be my favorite game from Garphill Games. 😊 There is a big asterisk on there because Reni isn’t very fond of this one, which is why it became one of my few solo games (though I very rarely actually play solo). Also, the South Tigris series turned out really great which threatens the status of Viscounts. But alas, we finally played some 2p games of Viscounts again! 💪

To me the design of the game is immaculate. You play a card each turn that determines how much you move on the main rondel (did I mention I love rondels? 😄) then you do one of the main actions, the power of which depends on the amounts of symbols you have from cards and other effects. Additionally each action has a resource type that you can pay to raise its power. 

⚜️ You can put meeples in the central castle gaining all kinds of bonuses. The way it all works is a fun mini-game inside the game.
🔨 You can construct buildings, unlocking ongoing abilities and claiming benefits at the same time.
📖 You can transcribe manuscripts, gathering sets and gaining rewards.
💰 Finally, the trade action is a bit of a complementary action, letting you turn sack symbols into all kinds of resources to prepare for the other 3 actions.

Cards play a huge role. They either activate upon playing, when they slide off, or they have a permanent effect while they are on your board. There is deck-building with lots of different cards! 😁

The end game trigger is quite special too - though it’s a bit of a mixed bag. ⚖️🤔

There are debt cards and deed cards that you can collect during the game. Whenever one of the stacks runs out the game ends, and whoever flipped more of the other card type wins extra points, which theoretically introduces a bit of a seesaw effect: E.g. when you see there are barely any debt cards remaining, you gun for deed cards. In practice it’s a bit more difficult to deliberately do so, and my other problem is that it is really hard to gauge when the stacks run out. This otherwise fascinating end game concept is thus our biggest gripe with Viscounts. 

We did also finally try the two expansions which we will write about later. 😉