SPIEL '18 Preview: Majolica, or Fire Up the Ovens (in an Orderly Manner)

As SPIEL '18 gets ever closer — or rather, as I move ever closer to SPIEL '18, it being an event fixed in time whereas I travel through that substance in a predictable and mundane way — I find myself racing to preview as many games as possible. I receive samples of many titles that will be widely available at that show for the first time, and I play as many as I can in the time available to add a bit more information about this game or that to what's already available, especially since feedback from actually playing a game usually provides a better understanding for what it is compared to reading a description or the rulebook — at least I hope that's the case.

Yu Wang's Majolica from Blue Magpie Games sort of made sense after a first (and second) rules reading, which admittedly was undertaken by a Chinese-speaking guest who was presented with the rules upon arrival at my house and ordered to teach us the game. (I've now played the game a second time with English rules from the publisher.)

The basics of Majolica are straightforward: Draft tiles from a central pool, assign them to workshops, complete orders for points. If you've played games, then that won't be new to you. What is new is how the components are put together and how the logistical challenge of managing everything feels like an actual business — at least in one regard.

Each player has four workshops where they are creating tiles, with each workshop having a different condition for when the ovens are fired and tiles delivered to an order. The leftmost workshop needs two sets of three tiles, the next one three sets of two, then two sets of two, and finally one set of four. When a workshop is full, then it "runs" and delivers 1-3 tiles to the order currently assigned to it, after which it ships most or all remaining tiles to the next factory down the line. You can picture yourself being the owner of a chain of tile-firing workshops, and as one batch is completed, you deliver some to an order while restocking another workshop. (I'm not sure why you wouldn't fill the order completely from the tiles in hand, but I suppose you're trying to supply stock to multiple outlets so that you can partially satisfy all available customers instead of frustrating some by having nothing at all. That's how many businesses seem to work, after all: "Yes, you can certainly order that mattress. Just place a hold and down payment on that, and we guarantee we'll have the box spring in stock next week.")

As you draft tiles, you must assign them to a single workshop, and when it's full, it runs, shipping extras to the next one, and if that one is now full with the right combination of goods, it runs as well. As a business owner, you want to see everything humming along, with orders being filled regularly — but your ability to do that depends on whether you can draft the right tiles.

The central board has four copies of four colors of tiles in a 4x4 grid, and on a turn you draft either (1) one tile from an exterior part of the grid and a new order card that you must assign to a workshop, (2) one tile from an exterior part of the grid, with the ability to reassign orders as you wish at your workshops, or (2) all continuous tiles on one exterior edge, which in the picture above would be three tiles from whichever edge you chose. When you take more than one tile, you must place them in the same workshop, but since everyone's dipping into the same pool of raw materials, you can rarely take everything that you want at once.

I wish that I could play more than the two games I've played so far on a review copy from Blue Magpie Games, but other games need attention as well, so I'll pop this write-up in the kiln and make my way to the next workshop to keep going...