Version played: Preproduction mock-up from the publisher
Times played: 14, at all player numbers from 3 to 7

My wife makes great oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies and as is often the case with sweet snacks I eat more of them than I realize in a single sitting. The plate of cookies sits beside me while I'm playing a game or doing some household task, and I eat one, nibbling away at its slightly salty, chocolatey richness and marveling at the simple yet intriguing mix of tastes – then I reach for another, and then another, and while the cookies all come from the same batch, each individual cookie has a different blending of oatmeal and chips and dough that makes it stand out from the others. They're not smooth and circular and uniform, but rather a chunky and variegated cookie reef of yumminess that you slowly break apart and consume, each bite distinct yet blending into a steady mainline drip of deliciousness.

When I first played Dominion in April 2008, Dominion was the gaming equivalent of that plate of cookies, each game being distinct while also blending together into a delightful gaming experience akin to what gamblers must feel when they play the slots: Laying out the Kingdom cards is the coin going in the slot; those first few buys are the pull of the handle, the lever that kicks everything into action; then the wheels spin and spin as you see how that initial investment pays off. Did you draw the Chancellor with enough Treasure to get you to Gold? Can you Mine your deck to richness? Will the Throne Room find enough inhabitants to be worth the investment?

Yes, you make more choices playing Dominion than someone who plays the slots – where the only real choice is to play or not play – but at the same time you also feel like you're along for the ride; you're on the ocean riding out the hurricane that's developed from the butterfly wings that you strapped on and flapped around, making adjustments to the storm as best you can while trying to reach that sunny patch of land far off in the distance that signifies survival and therefore victory.

And whether you succeed or not, you find yourself wanting to make that trip again. Maybe if you stock different provisions this time, maybe if you start in this direction instead of that one. You reset the Kingdom stacks, shuffle up and find another cookie has vanished from the plate.

What does all this have to do with 7 Wonders? Simple, 7 Wonders is the next Dominion.

To be clear up front, the games share almost nothing in terms of how they play and what players do in the game. No, I'm talking about the emotional feeling that comes when playing the games. You're presented with a particular challenge and a handful of simple tools at the start of play, and you want to use these items to assemble something majestic – or at least something better than all the other players. In 7 Wonders, you lay the groundwork in the game's first age, then build from there, sometimes finding that you've failed to acquire what you need to develop and sometimes finding the bricks all falling into place.

And at the end of the game, win or lose, everyone wants to play again immediately. Only once have we played 7 Wonders a single time in a sitting; typically we finish the game, then start sorting all the cards and preparing for the next game without even consulting one another to see whether they want to play. We all want to play again – right now.

The Wonder of Playing

So what's going on in 7 Wonders? At the start of the game each player is presented with a different wonder that produces one of four raw materials – stone, brick, wood, ore – or one of three finished goods – cloth, glass, papyrus. On the bottom of the wonder, three slots show what you need to build each level of the wonder as well as the bonus you'll receive after building it. Here's one such wonder:

You produce bricks each turn and hey, you need two bricks to complete the first level of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. You're halfway there! Where will you get more brick? From the cards that make up the heart of the game. A game of 7 Wonders lasts three ages; at the start of each age, each player receives seven cards from that age's deck. Each player drafts a card from their hand, passes the remaining cards to a neighbor, then takes one of three actions with the chosen card:

Discard it face-down for three coins.Erect the building shown on that card.Build part of your wonder.

The first action is self-explanatory. For the second action, you need to pay the costs shown in the upper left corner of the card. Let's look at a few cards for examples:

   

Of these three resource cards – two of raw materials (brown) and one of finished goods (gray) – the first two cost nothing while the third costs 1 coin. When you play a resource card, you tuck it under your starting resource, and you then have access to that resource each turn for the rest of the game. If you have the Hanging Gardens, you can pay for an Excavation in your tableau, and you'll then have access to the two bricks you need to build the base of your wonder. To build that base – that is, to take the third action listed above – you take the card you chose for the turn and tuck it face-down under your wonder in the appropriate slot. (Wonders must be completed from left to right.)

Let's look at a few other cards you might want to build:

 

Okay, you need a papyrus to build the Scriptorium, but you don't produce paper, so what do you do? How about buying some from your neighbor, who's working on the Temple of Artemis?

In each round you can purchase the goods that your left and right neighbor produce by paying that person 2 coins for each resource that you buy. That player can't nix the deal, and both that player and his neighbor on the other side still have access to these goods. (So yes, you can use only one papyrus on a turn if you have only one symbol, yet you kind of produce three papyrus as your neighbors can also use it. Just wave your hand and don't think about it – we're using game logic here!) Training Ground requires two ore and a wood, but it's a card from the second age, which should give you (and your neighbors) time to build up resource production. Every time you build something, you add it to your tableau face up.

But resources aren't the only way to build cards. The buildings listed in the lower-right corner of the cards above can be built for free if you own the cards depicted. Build a Scriptorium in age one, for example, and you'll be able to build both a Courthouse and a Library for free in age two – assuming other players don't build them first, of course, and you don't receive both in the same hand and there's not something else more appealing on offer. This minor tech tree aspect of the design is a nice touch as you have two ways to acquire buildings, which means you can specialize in resources or only dabble in them as you desire – and the more that you play the game, the better you know the decks of available cards and their costs and how cards from the later ages build on cards in the previous ones. Some cards work in both directions, as with the Caravansery in age two, which you can acquire free if you bought a Marketplace in age one and which grants a free Lighthouse in age three.

   

So what do the variously colored buildings do?

Brown and gray buildings, which appear only in the first two ages, provide resources.Blue buildings earn you the points listed on them.Green buildings also earn points, but the value depends on how many you collect of each of the three types.Red buildings provide military strength.Yellow buildings relate to commerce, providing money, resources and points in various ways.Purple buildings (guilds), which appear only in age three, earn you points at the end of the game, mostly based on what your neighbors are doing. The Traders Guild, for example, earns you one point at the end of the game for each yellow card owned by your neighbors.

In each age, players draft and play a total of six cards, throwing away one of the two cards they receive in the final card pass. At the end of an age, you compare your military strength with your left and right neighbors, earning 1, 3 or 5 points if you have more and losing 1 point if you have less. After three ages, you total the points in your tableau, on your wonder, in your bank and from military actions to see who wins.

Then you shuffle everything and play again. Well, we do anyway...

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

The function of the resources, guilds and military highlights part of the genius of 7 Wonders. All of these cards care only about your left- and right-hand neighbors, not about everyone in the game, so you can focus your attention on what these people are doing to react to their play and hopefully turn the situation to your advantage. If a neighbor produces lots of resources, you look for Trading Posts that will let you buy their resources for 1 coin instead of 2. If someone ignores the military, you sneak out a red card at the end of the age to "steal" a bonus instead of merely breaking even with that person. If the player needs a specific resource for her wonder, you take the card yourself so that the neighbor will have to buy the goods from you – or you stuff that card in your wonder to take that resource out of the game. Similarly, you can cut off green science buildings so a neighbor can't complete a set or a commerce card that would give a poor neighbor cash. (In the latter case, if you strand a neighbor with no money, that person will be less able to take buildings that benefit you – unless the person is going heavily into science, which tends to allow for free upgrades.)

At the same time, your neighbors are looking down the line to see what they might want to do about their neighbors, so while you're not directly interacting with people on the other side of the table, their actions do have an impact on you (and yours on them). This ripple effect mimics the interaction of nations and neighbors in the real world, with the refurbishing of one homeowner's lawn encouraging those next door to replant flowers and bushes, which in turn inspires the next guy down the line to repave his driveway, and so on.

The genius in 7 Wonders also comes from the simultaneous play of cards, which means that a three-player game lasts the same amount of time as a seven-player game. (Actually the three-player game might last longer since your neighbors are the only two other players in the game, which means that your actions more directly affect all opponents. Thus, you tend to spend more time on the card selection as you get two cards out of each group, so by examining the boards you can sometimes figure out which cards from that pack might float around the table and come back to you.) You can react to what neighbors are doing, but only with the next card that you choose – and you're choosing from a pack of cards that your neighbor handed you so that person largely knows what your options might be in the future, which could have affected their choice in the current turn.

Replay History Again and Again

The final bit of genius in 7 Wonders comes from the variety and predictability that's built into the game. To start with the predictability, each age deck scales based on the number of players; cards with "3+" on the bottom are used with all player counts, those with "4+" are used only when at least four players are in the game, and so on. Age three includes ten guild cards, but only 5-9 of them are used depending on the number of players – and the ones not used are removed randomly. As you play the game multiple times, you come to learn which cards appear more than once when playing with X people. (I suppose you could look through the decks before shuffling and dealing, but thumbs down on that approach.)

With this knowledge, you can start anticipating what might be coming around the table and when you can pass on a card since you'll likely have another chance at it. With three players, for example, I believe that each card appears only once in each age, which means that if you really need something, you better grab it the first chance you get. I learned this lesson in a recent game as I passed on acquiring a second wood resource – something I needed to build the second stage of my wonder – as I felt confident that one of the other two players would acquire it and I could just buy the wood instead, while using my card picks for something bigger. What I overlooked, though, was that each player had a wood supply: one through a commerce card (which doesn't allow purchases from neighbors) and one through his wonder (ditto). Thus, I was shut out of the second wood I needed, which then cut off further purchase opportunities down the road. For want of a nail...

Variety in 7 Wonders comes from a number of sources, starting with the card decks themselves. You never know which seven cards (then six cards, then five...) you'll receive in an age, so you need to stay flexible in the early rounds, paying attention to your neighbors to see whether they're staking themselves out in science or military or resources or what have you. What will they not take that might be passed to you? What do you need to cut off that the neighbor you're passing to might want? (The direction of passing switches from age one to two to three, which creates a nice back-and-forth effect. As I suggested earlier, cash on hand is a huge tool as it allows you the freedom to buy and build more, so cutting off money in age one can pay dividends in age two when the cards go the other direction.)

The wonders themselves also provide both variety and predictability. Look at the Colossus of Rhodes, for example, and you'll suspect that the owner will go a military route to some degree since building the second level of the wonder provides two military strength, which translates into points at the end of an age. Yet the player needs wood and brick to do this while having access initially only to ore. Are the wonders that provide wood and brick next to this player? Are they even in the game? If not, then it's more likely that everyone will be grabbing these resources, which might keep them out of this player's hands. Another question to think about: How many players are in the game? The different deck compositions for different ages will affect how many chances this player has to acquire those resources.

As with the taoist game boards in Bauza's Ghost Stories, also published by Repos Production, each wonder board is double-sided. The A-side of each wonder has the first level worth 3 points and the third worth 7, while the middle section is different for each wonder: The Hanging Gardens gives you a science icon of your choice; the Temple gives you 9 coins, which provides buying power; the Statue of Zeus lets you build one building for free each age; and so on. The B-sides don't follow any formula, including the number of levels in the wonder. The three levels of the Statue of Zeus, for example, let you buy raw materials from your neighbors for only 1 coin, earn 5 points, and copy one guild from a neighbor at the end of the game.

Some wonders seem incredibly overpowered and others weak; the Temple of Artemis brings a "blah" out of most players as money isn't as exciting as free buildings – but I've won the game by using the Temple's power to good effect. After all, if you get free money from building the wonder, you don't have to spend build actions on cards that do nothing but earn coins. Again, the number of players in a game affects how good or bad a wonder's powers might be due to the changing deck compositions, but as you play the game more, you learn how to play a particular wonder better, in addition to learning how to react to the neighboring wonders and their owners. Your play style and the requirements of the wonder merge, then you play off all that's happening around you.

The best example of this comes from my group's first two playings of 7 Wonders. Out of six players in those two games, one player earned more points in the second game, one earned the same number of points, and four people saw their score decline. Why? Because after one game of mostly random play in which we focused only on what we could do, we started looking to our neighbors to see what we could stop them from doing. Don't let that person nab another military card; don't hand over a fourth science card with that icon; don't hand over money for purchases too freely. The change in scores from one game to the next was an immediate lesson to all of us: Your neighbors can hurt you if you let them, so stay flexible and find a path that you can make your own. Play to your strengths while enabling their weaknesses.

Then we shuffled the cards and the wonders, and we played a third time...

You can see the complete review here on Boardgamenews