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Lacrimosa can be overwhelming when setting it up for the first time. Once you’ve processed all of it (or had someone explain it to you), it makes a lot of sense and flows well. In the last section, single note has the majority again. Blue and Purple each earn 3 points, and Yellow earns just 1 point for their double note. Impressions Players score the corresponding victory points for each of their markers in those sections. This is a very unique strategic element that can have a profound effect on final scoring in the game. For each section of the Requiem, count the composer markers. Whichever composer has more markers in that section scores the higher victory point value for each marker with their symbol. Note: those symbols are for a composer, not a player.
If you love efficiency euros, you’ll enjoy Lacrimosa. It’s not going to become your favorite game, but you’ll have a decent-to-good time. Even if you love efficiency euros, it’s not worth seeking out in my opinion. Let Lacrimosa come to you. The theme is a welcome change from farming and war, even if it makes absolutely no intuitive sense in terms of gameplay, but there’s so much more to learn here than the decision space rewards. I scurried through the overview to discuss this design. First off, what an intriguing thematic choice. While Lacrimosa’ sea of beige and staunch European illustration places it firmly in the Euro strategy camp, it blends several mechanisms and couples these with the most curious narrative. Players are patrons vying to be the best at remembering their time with Mozart, spending sweet, sweet coin on the composition, and interacting with performances from the past (or present?). It doesn’t all come together thematically, but each action is rooted in specificity to service the dizzying sense of place. It’s as if two timelines have been smashed together. A moment of calm before the widow enters to seek our knowledge about the great composer. A truly inspired production, Lacrimosa blurs the lines between board game and art. The presentation embraces the period behind the theme doing everything it can to immerse you in the unique and ambitious subject, the process and its distinct moments. Right from the moment it was announced, Lacrimosa is a title that has captivated hobby gamers with 2 simple ingredients: a pedigree from Devir (the accomplishment studio touting the success of recent games such as Bitoku and Red Cathedral) and a truly eye-catching cover full of emotion and energy. Everything seems in place to not only deliver an exciting, functional game, but an original experience.
So if you want the tile in that section from the top composer, you’ll need to put your token with the eighth note side facing up, you immediately get the bonus listed next to where that token was on your board, then you have to pay the cost shown on the tile you want. These get more expensive as you get deeper in the pile, so earlier is better. In the end, I never found myself getting too excited about the turns. There are opportunities to build mini-combos, but I never found myself getting too high or feeling tension. The gameplay is fine and I would probably be up for a game of Lacrimosa in the future, but it’s not something I would play regularly. There are some interesting decisions, just not enough to get me excited. While there is some variable setup with different composers and different cards, I don’t think there is enough variety to justify too many repeat plays. Over five rounds and set in different eras of Mozart’s life, you play as a patron to the composer, charged by his widow Constanze to tell stories of your travels together, as well as sponsor the completion of his final composition. Much of this activity happens on a central board that features a map for travel, a card market, as well as a scoresheet that represents the Requiem that must be completed. Next let’s talk about Performing and Selling Music. These two actions are performed using this card, which shows the Queen of the Night on stage [ed. At this point, one of the players pretends to sing a few bars of opera], yes, exactly, and this parchment scroll. When you perform this action, you can choose whether you want to perform or sell whichever one of your pieces you want. Each piece of music has a cost for being performed or sold–the resource is called “Talent” but we’re calling them Mozart Busts because that’s what the image is and why is Mozart’s talent a resource that I am accruing to spend later? It doesn’t bear thinking about, it doesn’t retain any water. So you spend that resource and you get, if you perform the piece, the amount of money shown on the card. Then you rotate the card 90º to indicate that it has been performed this round. The next action, Perform or Sell Music, is the only action that is independent from the game board as it only impacts your personal tableau of Opus cards. When you Perform or Sell Music, you are performing or selling one of the Opus cards in your tableau. Each Opus card has a cost and reward for performing it, as well as a cost and an even more powerful reward for selling it.
There are two elements in Lacrimosa that seem to trip people – the iconography and the area majority scoring for the Requiem. The icons for Documenting a Memory and Commissioning an Opus both focus on writing. They were similar enough that most players got them confused at least once.Royal Court tile exampleIf you take a city tile, you discard the tile to the side of the board after you gain its reward. The rewards could be resources, money, victory points, actions, and more. For example, there’s a city tile that grants you 3 VP for each religious music Opus card you have. This is one of the Opus card set collection benefits I mentioned above. Alternatively, if you take a royal court tile, you gain an immediate reward, then you take the tile which has an endgame scoring objective based either on Opus works you’ve funded (Opus cards in your tableau) or for your participation in completing the Requiem, which brings me to the fifth and final action in Lacrimosa. As for the Pax Pamir remark, there was nothing disingenuous about it. As I sat down to teach a table of four Lacrimosa, my friend Nathan sat down with three people who’d never played Pax Pamir. Pax took maybe five more minutes to teach, and both games finished around the same time. In fact, I think Pax Pamir finished a bit earlier. With games like Pax Pamir, the rules overhead and playtime are often cited as the reasons for not playing. “It’s kind of late,”“I don’t want to learn a complicated game right now,” etc. Lacrimosa will appeal to many of the same people, but it doesn’t present as that sort of endeavor. Given that it is, I find it salient to note that Pax Pamir, even with its rules questions and exceptions, could be managed in the same amount of time. You are entirely correct to note that Lacrimosa is a smoother initial playing experience, but that wasn’t the point of the comparison. There are so many different ways to play Lacrimosa that we haven’t yet settled on any primary strategy. Players may seem to be surging ahead with their tactful acquisition, performance, and sale of music, or they could be charging around Germany, visiting city after city. Players could be building progressively more powerful memory cards and leaning on period bonuses or Royal Tiles, or they could be banking on contributing the most to the Requiem, and scoring huge end-game points.
The real tragedy is that both games feature a mechanic that I adore–more on that in a moment–that gets buried under too much ancillary matter. Voi che sapete che cosa e amor, Donne, vedete s’io l’ho nel cor. Both games feature beautiful production that emphasizes unique themes, but they are themes that have absolutely nothing to do with the gameplay experience. For Bitoku, about Japanese forest spirits, the theme simply disappears. Lacrimosa is unique amongst games I’ve played for the degree to which its theme actively works against understanding the game. I didn’t bother using the theme of Bitoku to teach new players because it was faster to explain everything mechanically. I avoid using the theme for Lacrimosa because attempting to incorporate it makes the game significantly less comprehensible. That’s really bad. They could choose Sussmayer instead (upper tile, represented by single eighth note), but it costs 8 ducats instead of 4. Maintenance Players gain victory points throughout the game, but they can earn extra points for certain end game perks. Royal Court tiles (bought while Traveling) reward points for sets of Opuses or Requiem movements. Finally, players score the Requiem. The other disappointment is in upgrading your hand of cards. I love this idea, but the upgraded actions never delivered. This is a combination of the limited turns in the game where upgrading a card will only benefit a future turn and the fact the upgrades weren’t that much better than the base cards.Thank you for reading, Hal, and for your comment. I agree that this review doesn’t work. It is too long for how little there is to say on its subject. I tried something—Hey, this game is too long for what it’s doing, what if the review were equally stagnant—and it didn’t work. If you choose to sell, it’s a similar idea, but you’ll get some combination of victory points and permanent improvements to your income for each round. Also, the card gets handed to me and goes into the Box of Pain. Please note, you cannot perform a work and then sell it in the same round. Not allowed, no-no. Pt. IV: Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio
Let’s look at buying an Action first. You slot the book and candle into your board, that means you want to buy one of these. The cost for Actions is printed straight onto the board, and you can see that cards are less expensive as they approach the right edge of the market. So let’s say I want to buy this card, which costs one Ducat, the currency, and this symbol means it costs one resource of my choice. I pay those, and then the new card replaces the card I slotted into the bottom section of my player board for this turn. That card gets removed from the game. We pop it straight into the box, which is how we ended up in that setup mess to begin with as it should happen. This does mean that you’ll get the resources listed on the bottom of the card you just bought for the next round. Before I explain this, we should get it all on the table, that’ll make the teach easier. I’ve got jobs for everyone, if you don’t mind. Mary and Susan, can you help me separate these cards by, I think the game calls them Eras, by the little roman numeral on that red shield in the middle of each card? Look out for the player crests, too. We’ll each get a set of those as our starting cards.Commission an Opus: Gain an opus card to add to your display, paying the indicated cost and gaining victory points. A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not; but a man of superior talent will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place. Devir went the extra mile to develop a game with a unique theme that engages the actions in a creative and interesting way. If I’m rating Lacrimosa on ambition and production, it’s an easy 10. Unfortunately, the choices, actions and replay ability don’t quite meet those initial lofty expectations. That’s not to say it’s a poor game, just one that didn’t quite live up to the expectations it built for itself. I’ll briefly dissect some of my issues and point out where the game succeeds and falls short. A game of Lacrimosa is played over five rounds, each of them corresponding to a different creative stage in Mozart’s life. Each round begins with a Main phase where you take actions, followed by a Maintenance phase where you clean up and prepare for the next round. At the end of the fifth round and endgame scoring, whoever has the most victory points is the winner of the game. At the end of the game, the note tokens you’re placing here will score based on majority. This section, the Sanctus, for example, whichever composer has more tokens in this section, each of those tokens will be worth six points. The composer with fewer tokens in this section, each of them will be worth three points. Each player will score for however many tokens of each they have there. Again, that doesn’t happen until the end of the game.
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