Century Eastern Wonders.

Emerson Matsuuchi’s Century Spice Road was a modest hit in 2017 that earned a lot of comparisons to Splendor, although it gave players more of an active role in trading the goods they were collecting before they cashed them in for points tokens. It’s the first game of what is now a completed trilogy with this summer’s release of Century A New World, three games that can be played alone or in any combination of two or even all three, each of which shares a core mechanic (you have four goods of increasing value, and will trade them up so you can collect certain combinations for points on objective cards) but approaches it in a unique way. Spice Road is a card game that focuses on hand management; A New World, which I’ll review for Paste next month, is a worker placement game a bit similar to Stone Age. The second game, Century Eastern Wonders, has players moving around a map, with a bit of pick up-and-delivery to it, but the heart of the game is route planning, as the board varies in each game and you will have to figure out the most efficient way(s) to get around the various tiles to get the cubes you need so you can score.

Once again, we have four goods, in the same four colors – yellow is the least valuable, brown the most valuable – and players try to collect sets of them and then go to one of the four port tiles at the corners of the modular board to trade in a specified combination of the goods for a points tile that is worth anywhere from 11 to 20 points. Each player has a boat to move around the board, moving at least one tile per turn. When you land on a tile, you can place a trading post on it, doing so for free if it’s empty and paying one cube for each opponent’s post already on the tile, after which you can use the trading function of that tile as often as you’d like, including more than once on this turn. (In a two-player game, you pay two cubes to build on a tile with your opponent’s post already on it.) All trades on the board are net-positive, so there are no bad tiles, but some are more useful than others, depending on what objectives are present at that time in the game. You can also move to a tile and choose to ‘harvest,’ taking two yellow cubes for free, rather than trading.

Eastern Wonders adds an additional layer on top of this mechanism, as you gain points and bonus abilities as you place trading posts. Your player card has 20 spaces on it that are covered by posts at the start of the game. Each tile has an icon representing one of the four trade goods, and when you build a post on a tile, you take a token from that row on your card. Once you’ve emptied a column on your card, you may take one of the game’s bonus tokens, which can confer valuable abilities – moving one extra space for free each turn, getting a free pink cube when you harvest, storing 13 cubes instead of 10 – or just give you points at game-end. The second post you place from each row is worth a point at game-end, the third and fourth two points, and the fifth post three points.

Moving around the board gets more difficult as the game progresses. If you move to a tile with an opponent’s boat, you have to pay them a cube, so doing this is generally not a great strategy. Building posts on tiles that already have two or more posts on them, or just one in a two-player game, is costly, and you’ll often find yourself less willing to pay that penalty as the game progresses because you’re trying to scrape enough cubes together to fulfill another contract. The game ends as soon as any player finishes their fourth objective, with players just completing that round, so usually you’ll end up with one player getting four objectives and their bonuses and everyone else ending with three; it’s possible to win with only three objectives, especially if they have higher bonuses, but it’s harder, so there’s a bit of a race to the finish. You can improve your chances by figuring out optimal paths around the board that work a bit like engines – a sequence of three or four tiles that quickly let you go from some low-value combination (usually including two yellows from a harvest move) to the higher-value set that fulfills an objective card, or at least gets you some brown and green cubes you can then trade down for whatever you need for objectives on the board at that point.

Of the three games in the trilogy, Eastern Wonders is the most complex (although it’s still on the lighter side) and takes the longest to play, and while I like it quite a bit, I also think it’s my least favorite of the trio. The Eastern Wonders box includes a separate set of rules and a few additional components that let you combine it with Spice Road for a single game called Sand to Sea, although a glance at the rules seemed to rob the games of the elegance that makes them both fun. Eastern Wonders plays two to four, as do the other games in the series, but in our experience can easily run an hour for even a three-person game with fairly quick turns, longer than the other two require, and I would say this is the least appropriate of the three for younger players because of the route-optimization aspect. For adults and older kids, though, I recommend it.