Base price: $45.
1 – 5 players.
Play time: 45 – 60 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 3
Full disclosure: A review copy of Stonespine Architects was provided by Thunderworks Games.
Sometimes I forget how long it takes games to get made. I think I played this for the first time at GAMA EXPO in, like, 2023? It was still in Reno and not Kentucky, so I actually went (for all of my complaining, a major factor in my attendance was that I could drive there as opposed to all the other non-PAX West conventions I have to fly to). This was a late-night, spur of the moment game, but I can always mess around with a Thunderworks title. They’re often a bit heavier than I’m looking for, but I’ve never been disappointed. So that was a good time and then, here we are, with an actual Produced Game in my hands and writing about it at 5AM in between bouts of Sea of Stars-fueled insomnia. Working on that last bit. But let’s talk about Stonespine Architects!
In Stonespine Architects, players take on the role of dungeon designers trying to build the ideal locale. You’ve been studying up and you’re eager to prove your aptitude by carving your own dungeon and filling it with the nastiest stuff around. Various oozes, a fire trap or two, and some ill-tempered goblins with pointy sticks. It’s nothing fancy, but they get the job done. That said, impress the right people and you might be able to do this full-time if you can distinguish yourself from your dungeon-constructing peers. This lost art has become your career; what will your magnum opus look like?
Contents
Setup
This has a bit to it, so be prepared. Start off with the Market Board in the center of the play area:
Give each player a set of markers in the color of their choice, placing one per player on the 0 space and randomly placing the others in random order on the top Priority Track:
Give the second and third priority players one gold and the fourth and fifth priority players two gold, where applicable. Goal Cards come next! Shuffle them and place one face-up in the open spot on the Market Board:
Then, Challenge Cards. Shuffle them and reveal 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 if you’re playing with 1 – 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 players.
Shuffle the Market Cards and reveal 2 / 3 / 4 for 1 – 3 / 4 / 5 players.
The Market Tokens should be organized face-down by shape and set nearby. Fill the Market Cards with tokens of the matching shape, and then give each player a Dungeon Frame to serve as the top of their Dungeon:
Shuffle the Blueprint Cards and give each player one:
Each player should place a Doorway on the Dungeon Frame at the spot marked on their Blueprint Card. The other is saved for later. Finally, shuffle the Chamber Cards and deal each player five.
You’re good to start!
Gameplay
Surprisingly, the game isn’t too complicated. Your goal is to build the best dungeon around. Four rounds, each with three phases: Construction, Improvement, and Cleanup. Let’s go through each!
Construction Phase
This one’s the simplest part, in my opinion. You’ve got five Chamber Cards and you’ll be playing four of them. Take one to play and pass the rest clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on the round. (Clockwise in odd rounds, counterclockwise in even rounds.) At two players, you’ll also choose a card from your hand to discard and then draw a new card from the deck when you receive cards from your opponent.
Reveal the card you chose to play and add it to any open space in your Dungeon’s current row. Dungeons are built one row per round, and they’re built from top to bottom. This means you can’t move on to the next row until the current row (and round) are finished. There aren’t any real requirements on Chamber Card placement otherwise. The paths don’t need to match up. Just place them right-side up.
Once all four cards have been played, discard any remainders and move on to the Improvement Phase.
Improvement Phase
Here, players buy Market Tokens and seek Challenge Cards. Total up the gold you’ve earned from the four rooms in your current row, along with one extra gold per Treasure Chest in your Dungeon. Then, the player with the most gold can buy a set of Market Tokens (one space on the Market Card) or spend the rest of their gold (if any) on a Challenge Card. Note that the player with the most gold always goes, so if you still have the most gold after buying something, you get to go again. If two or more players are tied, the player with the leftmost priority of the tied players goes first.
Market Tokens are placed immediately, but they can be placed in any chamber in your dungeon with at least one empty spot. No placing over monsters or stars or anything! The Secret Passage (stairs) token can be used to connect two orthogonally-adjacent rooms that aren’t currently connected.
Note that gold is not carried over from round to round; to indicate this, as soon as you take a Challenge Card instead of Market Tokens, set your gold to 0 and place your priority token below the track in the leftmost free space. Also, there won’t be any Challenge Cards in Round 4, so you’ll just pass instead.
Cleanup Phase
Now, prep for the next round. Discard any remaining Market Tokens and replace the Market Cards with new ones, filling them with matching Market Tokens. Discard any remaining Challenge Cards and replace them with new ones. Shift the Priority Track up onto the board, and finally, deal each player five more Chamber Cards.
End of Game
After round 4, the game ends! Each player scores their Final Priority (leftmost scores more points). The Goal Card is evaluated for all players, as well. Then, each player scores their Challenge and Blueprint Cards, as well as any Reputation Stars (positive or negative) in their dungeon.
Finally, calculate the path bonus. Each Chamber connected by a path to the Entrance is worth 1 point; each Chamber connected by a path to the Exit is also worth 1 point. So if your Entrance and Exit are connected, all connected rooms score 2 points each. That’s nice.
The player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
It’s not too complicated at different player counts, since the game does so much to expand the offerings based on increasing numbers of players. For instance, you get more Market Cards, so everyone’s still going to get tokens (and may, in fact, get better ones since there are more options). You also get more Challenge Cards with more players. Your draft will be slightly “worse” than it would be with two players, just because you’re drawing a random card each turn at two, but functionally that’s averaged out by your opponent discarding cards that would benefit you at two players. It’s a pretty even spread, and that’s definitely one thing I appreciate about Stonespine Architects: it seems like they took great care to ensure that the play experience would be largely the same no matter the player count. There’s also a solo mode for y’all who are interested in that sort of thing. I love this at two players, but that’s because they do that drafting thing I love where you play a card and discard a card before you pass. You then draw a card, so you get more varied hands despite it being a two-player draft. It’s a tight fix, though it introduces a lot of randomness (which may not be your thing). That said, no major player count preference! Like I said, they did a lot of work making the experience consistent, and I think that shows.
Strategy
- Don’t leave your path up to chance. You get essentially double points if your Entrance and your Exit connect, so make sure you’re ready for that! Sometimes it’s worth grabbing the big empty room for connectivity reasons. If you aren’t paying attention, you might screw up your big exit and then only get half points, which sucks.
- Your Blueprint Card should be your gospel. It’s a full 20 points for doing everything on there, and the requirements aren’t too bad. That said, you should be endeavoring to only pass your opponents unhelpful cards. There’s a lot to be said for hate-drafting in this game. The harder you make it for them to fulfill their Blueprint, the better you stand to do.
- Even if you miss a requirement, you have a few shots to get it back via the token market. You can usually see every monster and trap type at least once over the course of the game via the Token Market, so try to capitalize on that when you can. Or buy something your opponent needs. You can be a jerk, here. It doesn’t necessarily benefit you if there’s something you need more, though, so keep that in mind.
- Try to balance the money that you’re going for against the room’s utility. You don’t want to take all 0-money rooms, since then you’ll be stuck without any tokens. Try to look at the Market Cards and see how important it is to get one of the Token sets before you get too deep into room placement, and then see how your options match up with your Blueprint and path.
- Secret Passages are almost always worth getting, if you can. They just add extra connectivity between rooms, which is almost always a good thing (save for certain Challenges, I imagine). You can also use them to cover for yourself if you messed up on your path placement.
- The Challenge Cards you pick matter a lot! Try to get at least 10 points with each one. I say this because there’s an explicit “gain 10 points” Challenge Card, so that seems like a good baseline. That said, you can get 15 – 20 points on some cards if you set up your dungeon right, so that should be your goal. It’s also just helpful to have a sense of how valuable the cards are.
- At two players, you should be actively discarding cards that would be advantageous to your opponent. Don’t give them cards that are worth a lot of money or that advance their Blueprint, if you can help it. They may still draw them from the deck, but forcing them to rely on random chance rather than absolute certainty is both cruel and entertaining. Plus, you have to discard a card each turn anyways; why not get rid of cards that would be good for your opponent?
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- This does my favorite drafting thing with two players. I love two-player drafting games that have you choose two cards: one to keep and one to discard. Then, each player draws a new card when they get their next hand of cards. It keeps things fresh so you don’t just see the same hand every turn.
- I love the goops and slimes and all those guys; I’m so glad they feature so heavily. They’re just very silly monsters and I love the Chambers where there’s just a ton of them doing something. Are they getting paid? Are they union men? There’s so much backstory here to plumb.
- I like the engine-building components of stacking up Treasure Chests to earn more money later. It’s a nice and subtle way to earn some additional money round-to-round, and it synthesizes well with some Challenges (and really badly with at least one Goal Card).
- There’s a lot of satisfying player order stuff for a simultaneous game. The way that Priority works around buying tokens and taking Challenge Cards is great. It means you need to think about prioritizing your turn order even though most of the game happens at the same time.
- There are a lot of ways to be successful in the game. You can focus on Challenges or Goals or Blueprints, but ideally you want to be doing a bit of everything and pulling points from multiple sources. It’s good practice and it helps make sure you’re resilient against mediocre drafts later in the game.
- I really like the Blueprint Cards; they give new players a really clear “what to do” map. It’s a nice and simple way to give players some initial structure, and that’s very helpful when you’re not immediately sure how to play. I’ve played this a few times with first-time players and they routinely cite the Blueprint Cards as making the game a bit easier.
- The insert is really good! Looks like it has room for more Chamber Cards, too. I’d love to see some expansions or a follow-up, just because the core gameplay is good. It seems like there are different scoring levers or functional levers you can move to change up how the game works, and I’d love to see what that looks like.
- I love a path-building element, and the one here is tough, but very gratifying if you pull it off. I can’t say I’ve always been successful, but it’s very fun to try and lay the ideal path through between entrance and exit for a bunch of extra points. When it works, it feels incredible, and even failing makes you feel pretty accomplished for coming close.
Mehs
- Could stand to have a few more Goal Cards. Eight is a fine number for variety’s sake, but I’d love to see some truly weird or complicated Goal Cards to just keep us on our toes.
Cons
- This is more of a reviewer gripe than anything else, but there are so many different types of cards and I can’t keep all the names straight. There’s Blueprint Cards and Challenge Cards and Goal Cards and Market Cards and Chamber Cards and Solo Cards and I assume something else I forgot about entirely. It’s mostly difficult from a photography perspective because I look at them and think “I have no idea what this is”, so a few photos might be mislabeled. Whoops.
- It would be nice to have a way to mitigate some bad luck, especially for things that are a bit more immovable like Chamber Type. I mostly say this because I drew exactly the wrong chamber for my last two-player game and was a bit salty about it, but it’s not the biggest deal. Ideally, you’ve fortified your dungeon against one particular strategic hiccup so you can get your points elsewhere.
Overall: 9 / 10
Overall, I love Stonespine Architects. Jordy Adan just gets the kind of games I like, I think, and between this and Cartographers I’ve been really pleased with the Roll Player larger universe. Tons to like, here. What I like most about it is that despite it being a more strategic, headier game, it’s not too tough to explain and get a variety of players into. There are also multiple ways to optimize and strategize each round, so players can set up their dungeon the way that they like and it gives players a lot of satisfaction for it all to come together. I’ve said this before, but there’s something particularly satisfying for me as a player to be able to look at my play area and see that I’ve built or created something unique and interesting. Drafting games, generally speaking, are also a nice form of interactive play, and I like to see that there’s a lot of strategic depth beyond just the initial draft. Not to deride games that are just pure drafting! I still love Sushi Go. Add in a pleasant art style and you’ve got yourself a solid game to play. Personally, I’m a sucker for path-building; something about laying cards to get the perfect path from start to finish really lights up some of the ol’ brain neurons and sells me on a game experience. I do wish at two players there was some way to better mitigate bad card luck, but since it can happen to both players and there are so many paths to victory, I’m not terribly bothered by it. I’m also looking at some of the empty space in the box and wondering if that means there’s something planned for the future of Stonespine. I’d love to see it. If you’re a fan of strategic drafting games, you like games with a lot of ways to win, or you’ve just always wanted to design your own dungeon, I’d definitely recommend Stonespine Architects! It’s been a recent favorite.
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