Guards! Guards! – A Discworld Game

I don’t know about you, but I am a huge sucker for both a) anything Discworld and b) nerdy board games with complicated rules, so when I saw Guards! Guards! roll in to the game store, I knew I had to have it. Fortunately the boyfriend also took note of this and sure enough, come Christmas it was nestled comfortably under our tree among all the other geeky things we had purchased.

I finally got a chance to play it over the weekend and I will tell you two things right off the bat: one, it was extremely confusing. Two, it was extremely fun.

As to be expected from Z-Man Games, the production quality was very impressive. The art is beautiful (though the font choices left something to be desired, which is honestly a regular complaint about Z-Man from me, but what can you do.) and all of the pieces are extremely sturdy. There was some confusion over the tokens and markers and where to put what, however – the biggest issue with the game in general seemed to be that the rules wording varied from the instruction booklet to the reference cards and it made it difficult to figure out what we were supposed to be going.

To date we have only played one game of Guards! Guards! and chose not to utilize all of the rules to the fullest… actually, that’s a lie, we blatantly forgot about many of the rules because there were just so many. It was a little fitting of the Discworld setting wehre everything seems to be needlessly complicated as a part of the canon, but as someone who has trouble with rules it was still a little difficult, even for a “Typical Complicated Nerdy Board Game.”

At any rate, the general purpose of the game if you remove all the extra rules and what not is very simple – the Octavo has been stolen and the Great Spells along with it (mostly due in part to the ape – the actual ape, not joking on a poor knight – who guards it) and it is the job of the players to return all of the spells to the Unseen University.

But, of course, this is Discworld – moreover, the game takes place in Ankh-Morpork, the least law-abiding city of them all, so of course it can’t be as easy as just collecting the spells and returning them. Never. Not in my Discworld!

The players each choose a guild (I went with the Fools Guild, naturally) and represent that guild as they travel around the board and attempt to collect the spells. As you work your way around, you must recruit volunteers to help you on your cause and aid you in running the collected spells back to the University. Meanwhile, there is a secret legion of folks who can summon dragons (we skipped this) and you can set up an ambush for your opponent (we skipped this too) and an 800 pound set of luggage stomping around that can send you to the Hospital and criminals you can turn in at the City Watch for money and…

Well, it should be pretty obvious at this point, there is a lot going on at once.

Getting down to brass tacks, once you collect a spell you must send it back to the Unseen University with a group of willing (or, you know, forced) volunteers who have the appropriate stats to help you beat the “challenge” that the Wizards had previously set up. These are pretty basic things – you have to have a high enough score in Loyalty or Magic and roll the die and there you go, you successfully returned the spell.

Though the game was a lot of fun, the sheer complication of it took away from it a bit for me. This was only a first play with two players, but it was still very exhausting. There were so many things you were responsible for that it was easy to forget what you needed to do on a particular turn, and the rules were a bit fuzzy at times so it was difficult to figure out if a particular move was acceptable or allowed, making for a very lengthy, very complex game.

Another small issue we had was that there was no clear indication of what some of the pieces were or what they were to be used for. The tokens you were supposed to use for the spells after you returned them were tall gold columns (at least, we think that’s what they were for) and they didn’t seem to want to stand up straight, especially once you tried to add more. The “Spell Run” token seemed kind of superfluous – you just put it on the University to indicate that you were going on a spell run, and then removed it once you were done. I’m not sure if we just misunderstood how this was supposed to work, or what.

All in all the game was extremely fun and I would absolutely recommend it, but it’s not a game for die-hard Discworld fans who aren’t so good with rules and complicated things. “Nerdy” board games are complex in general, but this one was a little over the top. That said, if you are a Discworld fan who does have a penchant for playing games with more rules than you can shake a stick at, you will probably love this game. I will absolutely be playing it again – hopefully with a larger group, and hopefully I can return here to tell how it went after we learned the rules a little better.

If you’re interested in checking out Guards! Guards! you can find it on Amazon easily, but the best price I’ve seen has been at Noble Knight Games (where mine came from) for only $39.95.

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2 Responses to “Guards! Guards! – A Discworld Game”

1. David Brashaw says:

   March 1, 2012 at 7:30 am

   Hi Manda
   Thank you for getting our game, playing it and writing your review. We are in the process of a re-print and will certainly be considering your comments amongst many others. You seem to have got most of it right. However I do suggest that you download the FAQ pdf from our website which gives a section of A Player’s Turn. This will make it much easier to remember all the things you can do. I would also recommend playing it with 4-5 players for more interaction, sharing the Pox, Dragons and Guild ability usage.
   Thanks again David

   Reply
   • Manda Collis says:

     March 1, 2012 at 9:57 am

     Thanks for the tips, David! I think it would actually be a lot of fun to play with a larger group – we don’t always have a big group available, but with this one in particular I definitely wanna find some folks so we can get together!

     I’ll definitely be checking out the PDF from the site – I didn’t realize that was an option, so thank you! Best of luck on the second print. I might have to check it out.

     Reply