Last year, Évora, a game from the Portuguese game publisher MEBO Games, was released in German by Heidelbär Games. The idea for the game came about while walking through the city of Évora, when João Quintela Martins, the game's author, passed by the city's Roman temple. Many of the ideas that came up spontaneously found their way into the finished game. You can find out how much we liked it in this review.
A Roman temple from the 1st century still stands in the Portuguese city of Évora. 14 columns survived this long time. The game lets us slip into the role of a builder in the 1st century. Our task is to build exactly these 14 pillars of the temple and have the most victory points at the end of the game. We get this by placing column parts or when we achieve majorities in individual columns as well as in the height of all columns.
On the site
A move in Évora consists of a movement and a subsequent action. First we move with our builder across the construction site, which consists of various construction site activities arranged in a roundel. Here we have to choose the next group from three consecutive free construction site fields and decide on one of these fields. Once we have moved, we can then use the selected construction site action or ignore the action and draw a card from one of the four piles. Cards give us more flexibility in our moves because we don't have to rely on the rondel. More on that later.
In addition to the players' builders, a centurion also moves around the construction site. This is an impartial pawn that can be used by all players, for example to activate and/or block actions for opponents that cannot be reached with your builder.
More flexibility thanks to cards
We can play one card at any time per turn after moving our character. Cards also have different types of actions. For example, a victory point card can be effective after using a construction site placement action to specifically gain more victory points. Alternatively, we can also discard three cards on our turn to carry out a unique but particularly powerful action. The various card effects and powerful actions make Évora beautifully dynamic and offer a wealth of tactical options.
Build pillars for victory
We only get victory points by building pillars. A column in Évora consists of 5 stone elements. For each stone you build you get a different number of points. For example, while the first stone gives you 3 victory points, you only get 1 victory point for the third stone in a column. However, these pay off at the end of a game, because this is about majorities. If you have the most stones in the third row, you will receive the most victory points at the end of the game. In addition to the majorities in the ranks, it is also important to pay attention to the majorities within a column, because for each column in which you have the most stones you also receive important points in the fight for victory.
This mix of victory points for construction and for majorities gives rise to interesting tactical considerations at Évora. The question often arises as to whether to focus on direct points or save them for later. The perfect balance must be found here in order to emerge victorious in the end.
Information about Évora
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| Number of players: 2 – 4 Age: from 8 years Playing time: 60 minutes Difficulty: Family game Long-term motivation: medium Classification: Area Majority, RondellAuthor: João Quintela Martins Illustrations: Matteo Piana Publisher: Heidelbär Games, MEBO Games Official Website: Link Year of publication: 2023 Language: German Cost: 49,95 Euro |
Conclusion
Thanks to its clever game design with the rondel, the different distributions of victory points and different types of cards, Évora manages to be a game that is simple in terms of rules and has great tactical depth. In our test games, Évora was consistently convincing. It was just fun to coordinate our actions in the rondel perfectly in order to build the pillars of the temple as profitably as possible. Évora not only has a convincing feel, but also simply looks good. It's great to see the result of our work together at the end of the game.
Only the rules are a bit complicated to explain despite the easy level of difficulty. How you have to move the worker, when which cards can be played, we didn't find all of this perfectly described in the rule book. However, that doesn't mean the rulebook is bad! The many really good illustrations in the rulebook help with understanding and as soon as you start playing the game, the “Aha!” moment quickly occurs when everything suddenly makes sense.
We would definitely like to highly recommend Évora because there is something for everyone here. It is very quick to learn for casual players and, thanks to its symbolism, is also easily accessible for children. Frequent gamers can also look forward to a game with many tactical options. At a price of around 50 euros, you definitely can't go wrong with Évora, because we are sure that the game will find its way onto the table very often thanks to its features.
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