Revisiting Woodcraft

Let’s continue with our #RoadToEssen hashtag, where we revisit games we bought at last year’s SPIEL to see if they are still good, or if they were just the cult of the new. (I guess to gauge whether it’s worth it to just buy everything we see, or if we should contain ourselves. 😅) This time 🪵Woodcraft🪵 is under examination! I’ll spoil it here and now: Woodcraft is an amazing game, one of Vladimir Suchy’s best, so it was definitely a worthy purchase. 🥰 I still couldn’t really rate it alongside Suchy’s other titles, because I really enjoy Pulsar 2849, Underwater Cities, Praga Caput Regni and Messina 1347 as well. I just know that the bar was really high and Woodcraft was above it too. 🎖️

Although it’s a contract-fulfillment game at its very core, which I don’t normally find appealing, Woodcraft is actually so much more. 😊

First of all you get the action wheel which is an evolution of Praga’s wheel. Actions that aren’t picked will get more and more valuable as an incentive, plus it also has a fun sawblade look which fits with the theme.

I love how dice 🎲 symbolize the wood resource you have - their color is the type and their value is the amount. This makes for satisfying dice placement puzzles all throughout the game, especially because of the methods for dice manipulation. 🙃 You could glue on scraps to raise their value, splice together different wood types, or saw dice into multiple smaller ones. It’s very fitting thematically but also super fun as you combo together these free actions.

The game is also very tight, so every action counts. Rewards you get from fulfilling cards are super important to calculate into your future turns so you can effectively churn out points. You can try slightly different strategies each game and your assistants in the workshop change things up too. There are many little gameplay elements that are just fun and contribute a lot to the overall experience. If you can pull off your plans, Woodcraft has a really satisfying euro gameplay. 🥰

I think Vladimir Suchy and Delicious Games is just an obvious choice for us every time, so we are ecstatic to get our hands on Evacuation and Shipyard 2nd Edition later this year.