Okay before we get into it, for people not familiar with my review style: I’m not really doing good “consumer advice” here on which board game you should buy. I’m doing reviews more for other design nerds like myself who like to pick apart and study board game design in and of itself. For making new games or new editions, or for its own sake because it’s fun to consider how things tick. I’m looking at a design more like “okay what went right here and what went wrong and how can we learn from that?”
Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Golem, which I hate, but its problems aren’t unique to it so I’m not trying to say that it’s an exceptionally bad game. Instead, the issues are pretty typical for most new school board games. I’m not trying to say that Golem is an outlier or pick on it especially. Every time you see a complaint below and go like “but that’s not any different from [list of twenty other popular complex euro games]”, I get that. That is the bigger point I’m trying to make here. Not that Golem in and of itself is bad or worse than other games, but that the gaming hobby is in a space where I don’t like most of these games.
I remember when Glory to Rome (which, don’t get me wrong, is a great game) was infamous for having such a complex game flow that a later edition added a flowchart player aid. “Materials go from pool to stockpile to vault, and clients go from pool to clientele, and buildings go from hand to being built”, and… It was known for being such an exceptionally complex game and now every game is like that. Golem is like three times more complicated than Glory to Rome. You need bricks to make golems to get knowledge to buy books but you need study to be able to hold more books and you need gold to improve your artifacts and the way you get them is so tangled.
You’re like “I need [open book icon], where can I get it? Oh I should’ve placed a marble on the other lane three rounds ago before I collected all of these [closed book icon]?”
When we got into more kennerspiel-y euro games, Caylus was so punishing when you made mistakes like going to the castle but not having enough food to build what you wanted after going to the carpenter earlier that same round. We’d stumble and trip up and for some of us that was fun and goofy and other people hated it. My dad was like “I never wanna play this dumb game again” after his first try of Caylus 1301 even though he was like one or two points behind the winner in a close game. He was just that frustrated with getting so “punished” by the game. But even for being as punishing as it is, Caylus has an exceptionally clearly shown game flow. You send out your workers along the road and things happen along the road and the bookkeeping stuff is also part of that same road. And if you want something you know where to find it. You want food? Go to food place. You want wood? Go to wood place. You want workers? Go to workers place. Super straight forward.
That straight-forwardness is not here. At all. The stuff you get and the stuff you need is all over the place in a way that’s not visually clear at all. I was crying halfway through our first game and we ended up actually starting over because it felt like information overload, like juggling twenty mental chainsaws. I needed to remember all the resource types, how and when to get them (you all get them in different, unrelated ways, and some are cardboard or wood while others are steps on boards or trackers and yet again others are abstract invisible intangible ideas), and how to use them. After one or two games, you might be able keep the flow in your head, I’m not disputing that. Clearly people are playing this game and enjoying it, that’s just facts, it’s not literally physically unplayable for everyone. I’m just saying that the game doesn’t show you that flow at all.
And you get tripped up. Oh wow you get tripped up. I should’ve increased my bookshelf before getting more books, improved my golem making process before getting more golems, improved my scholar before letting the golem loose etc. It’s a cruel and punishing minefield of a game where the “reward” for getting better is learning where the broken steps are so you don’t fall down the stairs into a cellar full of claymores.
The other heavy game my friend bought when he bought Golem was Black Angel; a game with an equally (or even more?) muddled and unreadable game flow but which came with a player aid that explained everything. What order you do things in, what the phases are, what you get where. The player aid in Golem is this one little card and it’s the stingiest li’l list of icons that I’ve ever seen. It serves as a reminder if you already know all the steps by heart, not as an explainer if you don’t or even a refresher if you mostly know. It doesn’t show in what direction things go. If the aid card shows you marbles you don’t know if that’s the step where you retrieve your marbles or get them or get the reward from them or place them or replace them. All stuff you need to do over the course of a turn but you better learn that elsewhere because the card is giving you zilch until you’ve memorized every icon rebus on the helper card means. Which brings us too…
I don’t hate all iconography (hieroglyphics rebuses) in games. I know that when I reviewed the Race for the Galaxy iconography, I got misunderstood as if I was complaining about the phase icons but I actually think those are really good (some of my complaints about other parts of RftG’s iconography were maybe a little unfair, so maybe I on-the-balance overall deserved the backlash I got for that review, but if I do, and that’s a big if since I still stand by a lot of the complaints I had for some of the other parts, that’d still be like getting fined for stealing tomatoes when you actually stole peaches since the one part that I got the most flak over was a complete misunderstanding because the phase icons in RftG, I tried to say, are good).
RftG discussion will be set aside because the gold standard for me for clarity and usability right now is actually a super recent game (see! Gaming isn’t going to heck in a heckbasket!) called Moon Colony Bloodbath which mixes icons, and keywords, and plain text in a straight-forward and clear way. That game also has super clear game flow: how you get every resource type and what you use it for is utterly straight-forward. The polar opposite of Golem. Yes, Moon Colony Bloodbath does have a little bit of a trap that you’ll sometimes get tempted into using basic game actions to get say apples while the much better way +o do it is to first build buildings that improve your apple getting action. I’m not gonna make excuses for Moon Colony Bloodbath there and instead am actually gonna ding it for that, but, the basic game actions are all super crisp and clear and self-evident and upgradeable rather than replaced. In Golem they’re as clear as mud. But that was the previous section (“Flow of the game”), we’re in iconography now so okay, back to the point of this rant:
Iconography has two components. The nouns (the icons) and the syntax (the way the icons are put together to explain abilities). I’m gonna slag both.
While the icons here are beautiful for those with a magnifying glass, the concepts are too similar and the icons are hard to tell apart. Open book vs closed book for example, or how the knowledge icon, which is the letter א is a very similar blue hue to the close book. And while you don’t need open books (which represent sitting at your desk and studying so that you can have more books and get more out of each books) before closed books (which represent acquiring new books), if you are gonna get both in a single turn, it’s often better to get the open books first so that you can put more of your new books on the same shelf. And you upgrade shelves with the knowledge icon א. The icon that means “non-black book” is also very similar to the icon for “the secondary cost on books is discounted”. A crossed-over black semicircle. While part of the problem is that the facets of the game (the schul, your study room, your golem slab, your actifact forge, and the streets of prague) all require different things but with a lot of coupling and entanglement from those separate parts. You go to schul to study which you need to better understand the books that you get by having your golem steal them from bookshops in the streets of Prague.
Now if the noun part is bad the syntax part is way worse because while ideally you see a triggered ability that gives you clay, that means you take that amount of clay, and that’s normal and straight-forward and that’s how some but only a few of the abilities in this game work. Clay, gold coins, gold ingots, and knowledge does work like that. Other icons lets you do upgrade parts of your workshop by flipping tiles or moving along a track or sending your scholar or golem out to mess around in Prague.
One especially inconsistent “resource” are the menoroth where yellow, red, and blue are distinct. (Don’t worry color blind people, you find them on different parts of the board so that’s how you can distinguish them even if they look the exactly same.) So let’s say you unlock a triggered ability that for example give you two VP, a gold coin, and three blue menoroth. The three blue menoroth aren’t a resource you “get” in the same way that the others; every time that ability re-triggers you get the VP and the gold coin. You don’t “recieve” menoroth. At the end of the game you need to find all the abilities you’ve unlocked that have a menorah reward and that’s when you count them. So they are an icon type that syntactically are presented in the same noun context as resource rewards and VP rewards but function completely differently.
But that’s not even the worst part of the iconography. This game like many modern games from Monopoly on has special abilities, both in the schul and in the shops of prague and even on some of your workshop upgrades. But instead of saying in plain text “go to jail” or “everyone pays you $200”, there’s a rebus often with completely new syntax and a bunch of one-off icons that appear only on that particular ability space. You have to look them up in the rule book and read what they do. My friend and I would both guess what they did and he’d guess wrong all of the time. All of the time. And he loves the game because he has more patience for this kinda stuff and also he bought the game so he has sunk cost reasons to love it but if they would’ve just taken the text in the rule book and put it directly on the tile or schul space, that would’ve been so much better. “All triggered abilities from purchasing non-black books are triggered twice” is instead written as a lightning bolt, a crossed over black semicircle, and an x 2. “Take the resources from each of your scholar steps” is written as three hands in different colors carrying stuff. And these aren’t even the worst ones, which are all in the rabbi spaces or in the marble schul and I don’t even remember them and the next time I play the game I’m gonna have to look them up again because the hieroglyphics sure don’t make it easy to figure out what they do.
Now, the good thing about hieroglyphics, and why it became such a standard in the board game world, is language independence. Which is a worthwhile goal. Not only do you save on printing different language versions, (even though all of these board games are ultimately doomed to the landfill since we’re all trapped on a garbage planet hurling towards a sharp and unyielding sword), people who don’t speak the same language can play the same game together. That is good. That is worthwhile. But if you can’t do it really well (which is really hard), an ability that is written in “icon-ese” is at least as hard to read as a language you don’t speak. I don’t speak a word of Czech but I was longing for some actual words in an actual language over the complete gobbledygook on these rabbi ability tiles. If it had been in Czech I could look it up, used a crib sheet, used Google translate, tried to remember it with words that I could at least try to fit in my head better than a Mort Walker character’s grawlix rebus. Sarge cussing out Beetle Bailey is clearer to understand than some of the stuff in this game!
The other good thing about icons is when they are used together with text for conciseness and consistency, like how Moon Colony Bloodbath mixes text and icons together perfectly. So I’m not saying banish icons completely. I am saying that some of the time, plain text does it better.
Roger wrote in, saying:
I understand the urge, when designing a game for a multilingual market like Europe, to avoid having to have any text on the cards which would need to be translated. But language is hard, and expressing complicated concepts in an invented language is hard, and having a translatable sheet of paper which tells you what all the icons mean may make the game cheaper to internationalise but does not improve the play experience. (Also, as the usual game teacher in my groups, I want to be able to read something out aloud and have the player know what I’m talking about.)
The point I started crying when we first learned the game, crying out of overwhelm and brain fatigue and feeling stupid and feeling like this game has too much to learn to even get started, that was the marble colors. You use marbles for worker placement and the red, blue, and yellow marbles each come with a reward of your scholar walking along that street, and the white marbles come with no such reward but counts as any color once the marble has become golem eyes (which yes is also a thing) while the black marbles come with no such eye color wildcardedness but gives you two street rewards of your choice (I think they need to be different but I’m not sure).
You get the marbles from a dice tower sort of thing that is supposed to randomize the marbles along five separate lanes but it doesn’t work. If you pour them to the left they fall to the left. If you pour them to the right they fall to the right. If you pour them in the center they fall to the center. If you drop one or two in (which you can do when you use the pass action) you can drop it into any lane of your choice. Now none of this is intended, and so to fix the game we’re probably gonna get red, yellow, blue, white and black dice to roll instead (rerolling sixes).
Am I gonna comment about the whole you are rabbis in search of gold and א and more gold and menoroth and you’re making monsters wreaking havoc in the streets of Prague in order to steal books and clay for your lab and glossing over the antisemitic context the Jews of Prague suffered under? Not really, because I’m more into talking about game design than themes! If people who know more about this stuff are gonna bring up complaints I’m gonna listen, and some already have. I’m a game design nerd, not a historian!
The good part of this game is how you can try to engine build across a couple of different dimensions. The bookshelf, the golem properties, your artifacts, your town lanes, and your burial (but also how super un-halakhic it is to bury golems in a cemetery! In the folklore they should be resting on the Altneuschul attic or be absorbed back into the ground).
The good part of that is how it creates a more-ish flavor, how after a game you’re like “okay wow I really got things to work together and got some good synergies going, let’s see if I can do even better next time”, or you’re like “ugh nothing came together at all and I just floundered and died with a whimper”. That’s actually also a not-so-good part, how sometimes you can get these extreme combos and ça plane pour moi and the next game you’re doing a whole lotta nothing while the track your opponent went for is incidentally giving him a bunch of free rewards in the very track you deliberately have struggled to improve all game long. There’s an overly big disparity between doing well in the game and just coasting, and struggling in the game and getting absolutely nowhere. But that’s how engine builders are, and why I kind of don’t like engine building games.
Compared to the aforementioned Black Angel, the interplay between the strategies here is more fun. Black Angel has three “types” of other aliens to interact with (gray, green, and yellow) and you really get hosed since if you interact with one of them you need to interact with that same alien even more to get your rewards from it, it overly rewards you for sticking to one color while simultaneously demanding stuff from the other colors; that’s much less of a problem here where you similarly get really rewarded for getting deep into a track (do not neglect books since they are the best) but the tracks help you on the other tracks instead of like in Black Angel saying “okay now you’ve gone to a green planet so you need to do the green action again and again in order to get anything out of your investment in that green planet but whoops you can’t because the resources you need to get to green planets you only can get from yellow actions so it sucks to be you” a problem that Golem also has but to a slightly lesser extent which feels makes Golem feel like the nicer game.
That’s why in spite of this overall negative review of Golem, I don’t think I’ve played it for the last time. There are still strategies in it that I want to explore and my complaints are mostly about readability and learnability and usability and clarity. Problems that you can get over and work around. Even when the problems are this huge and this bad. People are gonna say that “you just look up the rabbi abilities in the rule book and then you know them” or “you get used to the flow of the game after a while” and that’s fine for smart people but A. I’m probably not as smart as you are then, and B. Okay the problems go away once you’re used to them but that doesn’t mean they’re not problems.
My current apartment is utterly stupid in a way that permeates every corner of its layout and features. You can only open the fridge when the bathroom door is closed (and vice versa). You can only pull out the knife drawer when the cupboard door is completely open. You can only open the cupboard door when you’ve moved out all the chairs from the kitchen. Actually pretty far from the entire kitchen area because the cupboard door needs to swing far into the living room in order to pull out that dumb knife drawer. And every single corner of the living room has a door or a window so you can’t put any furniture in any of the corners. It’s a complete nightmare. And after living there for like three or four months I got absolutely used to all of those things, got used to working around them, and I started loving my home and feeling really comfortable there. I’m telling you all this to illustrate the following point: you can learn to work around problems but that doesn’t mean they are good design.
This game was pitched to me as “you only get twelve actions for the entire game” but not really because while you do only get eight marble actions and four rabbi actions, those actions are each spaces where you take multiple sub-actions, and can trigger other things like your golems which can trigger buying books which can trigger even more actions like a whole combotastic cascade of stuff. It’s pretty fun.
To console myself, I’m gonna have to try to put all of these complaints into the following perspective: the kinds of simpler games that I love are not endangered. They’re not scarce. They’re thriving; all my favorite classics are still around and more are being made and even improved. I need to remember that a game like Golem isn’t a threat to Carcassonne or Scrabble or Acquire or Hearts or Gin Rummy or Othello or The Great Dalmuti. Instead, the niche these heavy euros are going after is the old seventies SPI, Avalon Hill style of super complex games full of of chits and tables. Your Blue Max and ASL and 1830. Yeah, the production value of these newer games are nicer and probably more expensive. But I need to remind myself that this isn’t my precious simple nostalgia euro games dragged kicking and screaming into a quagmire of complexity. It’s instead the rich and replayable simulation hobby games given color graphics, more components, a variety of interesting themes from history and fantasy.
I can still dock this particular one for the hieroglyphics and poor UX and hidden game flow because even for what it wants to be, a heavyweight sim game, it could’ve executed on that a lot more clearly with better hieroglyphics (and less hieroglyphics and more text), but what I don’t need to do is lament “the state of modern board games”. Plenty of games being made that I absolutely love or old classics I can thrift for or dust off from my own shelves.