I don’t like games where most of the time is spent rolling dice that determine the further course of the game – winning or losing a fight, acquiring a given skill or the number of monsters that are about to attack me. I have no influence on this, so any victory or defeat is not the result of my skills, but luck or bad luck. That’s why I’m curious about board games that take the dice associated with adventure games and use them in a different way.
In the much-underrated Tidal Blades, we were able to modify our cubes, reducing the randomness on the rolls. In the Ganges , both the colors and the number of dots could be used in several ways, which forced the calculation and planning of subsequent moves. The dice also played a part in last year’s premiere of the Portal publishing house, i.e. Bitoku . And although according to Board Game Geek Woodcraft is a bit simpler, in my opinion it has a better chance of gaining a wider group of fans due to more understandable rules, a clearer board and symbols, and a more accessible theme.
The workshop was not built right away
As owners of carpentry workshops, we will have to fulfill orders. Before that happens, we have some preparations to do. Unfortunately, the box does not contain a sprue, which is why disassembling all the components to collect (blueberries, bones, cuttings, glue, saw blades, lanterns, tools and tile reuse tokens) is a bit time consuming.
On the board with the wheel, we randomly place seven tiles with possible actions to perform and dice in the colors indicated in the lower right corner. Below, we place the second board with the reputation, nut income and blueberry income tracks, as well as the fields counting down the rounds until the end of the game. There should also be a board with a scoring track and several decks with helper cards and orders, some of which are revealed at once.
Each player also receives their own board with space for dice representing wood, trees, hired helpers, and sawing, pressing and gluing tiles. On the right side we leave a place for orders, we get some starting resources and we can start the game.
Glue and saw – this is strength
At the beginning of the turn, our trees grow, i.e. the dice assigned to them increase their number, if we have any. Then we choose one of the seven tiles on the wheel and move it to the furthest free place of the next quarter. At first, moving and using actions may seem a bit complicated, but once you start playing, everything becomes clear.
The main actions are buying wood (bones), replacing cubes, hiring a helper, choosing an order, producing or planting a tree, upgrading a workshop and buying materials (glue, cuttings, saw blades). At any time of our turn, we can also perform free actions, i.e. use the helper’s skills, saw or glue wood, compact cuttings, cut down a tree or complete an order. Employees and orders are cards, of course, but most of the other actions are done with dice. They are quite logically related to the activities, e.g. gluing wood means replacing two cubes with one that has a value equal to their sum, and sawing is the opposite action – one cube is replaced with two whose sum is equal to the value of the first one.
Of course, this is just an outline of the mechanics, because there are several things here that I will not write about in more detail, such as collecting tools in the attic, smaller and smaller rewards, and eventually penalties for unfulfilled orders or nut orders, which are the only ones that allow you to use a public contract. Fortunately, the manual is well written, and the additional questions I had during the game were easily answered.
The game ends after the number of rounds specified on the board. The person with the most points becomes the best carpenter, and others may envy his skills.
Like a good, solid piece of furniture
From the moment I saw the Woodcraft cover , I had a good feeling about this game. And fortunately I was not mistaken, because it is a good piece of euro. This way of using the bones positively surprised me. You can split them, combine them, add clippings to them, increasing their value, buy, sell, plant and wait until they grow to the value we need, or use the helper skill to change the number of meshes. That’s all to complete orders and earn points. Although the atmosphere, as befits a eurogame, is not too much here, the names of the actions with the activities performed have been very nicely linked.
Although Vladimír Suchý is a fairly well-known designer, this is only the second of his games that I have had the opportunity to see. And both, both Underwater Cities and Woodcraft , remained in my collection. The Carpenter’s Struggle is a bunch of smaller mechanics that work well together. This ultimately results in a board game that requires planning and optimization to make the most of the available actions.
What I like the most is the aforementioned dice manipulation, as well as the falling value of orders, which is supposed to reflect the attempt to execute customer orders within the prescribed period, and the additional profits from selecting long-unused actions from the board with the wheel. And although similar treatments have already been used in other titles, in Woodcraft they create a surprisingly well-functioning whole. There is a “short quilt” here, so there is still something missing to complete our entire plan, but there is also a lot of satisfaction when we manage to switch the cubes so that in the last turn we will complete the last orders placed.
The game should appeal to fans of optimization, small and interlocking mechanics and many possibilities resulting from a dozen or so available actions. Certainly, beginners should not reach for it, because they will bounce back from the instructions and the excess of rules. After mastering the rules, everything becomes simpler, there are conversion tips and a shortcut of the player’s turn on the boards, so each subsequent game will be faster and smoother.
