The Goodenough

In The Magnificent you manage a travelling circus, in which your artists will be performing their acts with fire, animals and magic. Watching this show you will feel like a child again, marvelling at the wonders. If this were a thematic game, that is. And it isn’t. It’s a euro that has you planning your moves turns or even rounds ahead and calculating victory points and the rulebook tries hard not to get you immersed, calling all actions and resources orange (not fire), green (not animals) and purple (not magic). Colour me baffled.

There are just three actions in this game, so it isn’t hard to learn. At the start of a round some dice are rolled, for solo: one in each colour and two transparent ones that can act as any colour in the turn they are chosen. You will use the number on a die face as power for the action you take. Then you can manipulate this number with certain free actions on action cards, tiles or by spending gems. There are two fun details about the dice power though. When you pick a second die in a colour you already used, you add up the powers. So if you used a green 6 in your first turn and a green 4 in your third turn, you can use it as a “green power 10”. This way you can have amazing strong actions. But. At the end of the round you have to pay money for the highest power you used (and all transparent dice). And it’s not that easy to get money. So perhaps you’ll pick different colours for your turns, not adding anything up. Or you pick dice with a low power as you don’t think you will be able to afford a strong one. Great stuff.

So that’s the dice. What can you do with all your power? You can use it to (1) travel: move one of the coloured wagons around its track and pick up gems, tents to perform in and posters that have the objective of your performances. Or to (2) build, where you buy polyomino tiles with tents and artists, to fill your camps, triggering bonuses while you cover certain spots. And then you can use it to (3) perform, for which you will need a tent and a matching poster and artists in your camp. Every round you’ve got four turns, so you’ll do four of these actions. You will score victory points with the performances and by meeting a goal at the end of each round. At the end of the game you’ll score extra points for leftover goals and for how well you built your camp with the polyomino tiles.

I had borrowed The Magnificent earlier this year from a friend and was surprised how much I liked it. The solo mode is very good: you just block a few strategic performance spots, and try to reach 200 points. No upkeep, hardly any change in the rules (there’s a way to get rid of cards from the poster market and get extra dice in the pool, but that’s the only extra thing to think about). Even though the theme is pasted on, and the mechanics of moving a meeple around for gems, using gems in several ways, the covering of a grid with polyomino tiles are a mish-mash, I really enjoyed the puzzle. And every session is different, there’s a lot of variation in what action cards you can use, which posters and tiles are available, etc. I decided that sometimes what you need in a game is just that it’s good. Not everything has to be a masterpiece, you can also settle on good enough. So I traded for it, and now I’ve got a copy – and it gets played and I am having fun.

In other news, I was sad to see the designers have gone batshit crazy after making this game. Their newest one, Revive, is a complete and utter incoherent, unthematic, unwieldy monster. I’ve played it. I’d rather not have to do that again, shudder. It makes me cling to my copy of The Magnificent as I understand now how hard their struggle must have been to keep everything together.

#TheMagnificent #Svensson #Østby #AportaGames