Type: Card drafting
Players: 2 to 7
Play time: 30 mins
Difficulty: 🧠🧠½ (2.5/5)
Fun: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5)
Buy From The Game Shelf
Before Sushi Go and Point Salad, there was 7 Wonders. Considered one of the leading card drafting games, it’s a great choice for large and small groups alike.
Players each take control of one of the 7 Wonders, which serves as your game board, and offers a rough direction on how to play the game. The player with the Colossus of Rhodes for example gets bonuses to military power when building their Wonder, while the Hanging Gardens has a boost to science, making it worthwhile to pursue these paths further during the game. The boards each also have 2 play sides, increasing the variability and replayability.
The game uses a card-drafting mechanic, divided into three Ages, where seven cards are dealt to each player at the start of an Age. Players then select one of these cards to play, provided they can meet either its cost or prerequisite, before passing their remaining cards face-down to the person next to them. In exchange, they then receive the left-over cards from the player on their other side. All turns are taken simultaneously until there are no cards left, ending that Age. This means that every card choice has a meaningful effect on the game as you can take the opportunity to establish your resources early, but potentially at the cost of securing points, but it’s also great fun to instead sabotage your neighbour by stealing or discarding cards you know would benefit them.
The first Age consists mostly of free or extremely cheap cards, and will provide a player with either the resources they will later need to construct their Wonder and purchase the more expensive later game cards, or another bonus such as Military, Economic, Scientific or Civic. In addition to the bonus on the card, these non-resource cards are also part of a building chain, where having the previous card in a chain makes the next card free to play with no resource cost, and this can be a great advantage in later Ages.
The player who accumulates the most points by the end of the game wins, and this can be done in a number of ways such as having more military power at the end of an Age than your direct neighbours, stockpiling gold, collecting Science, building your Wonder, and building Civic structures.
While there is variation in the final Age, with the inclusion of randomised Guild cards that give end of game bonuses, the predictability of the game is both its greatest strength and greatest weakness, depending on your preference for games. I have a friend who loves analysing and calculating the odds to determine the optimal actions to take each round, and while it does tend to double the effective play-time of any game (you know who you are!), it’s what he loves, and how he plays, so we mostly tolerate it. 7 Wonders allows him to take full advantage of this as he always knows which cards will be present during each Age, and the end-game value of any given card can be roughly calculated on the fly.
The downside to this is that any player that effectively stockpiles Science during the game, pretty much tends to win. This is because the endgame scoring bonuses for Science feels disproportional to other scoring methods and early Science cards often allow free purchases of later Science cards allowing a player to snowball if given the chance. Now you might say “Surely the other players can simply stop one player from getting too many science cards? Problem solved!”. Well, yes and no. While I am certainly paying attention to what the players on either side of me are doing, I very rarely find myself looking up from my game board beyond that because I otherwise have zero interaction with the rest of the players at the table.
In a seven player game of 7 Wonders, there are four other players doing their own thing, making their own plans, that I simply do not “need” to pay attention to. The experience with my group is that at the end of a game, so much time is spent focusing on your own board and your own goals, that the end of the game is spent looking around the table asking “So what did you build?”.
That is not to say that 7 Wonders isn’t a fantastic game to play, because it is! It accommodates from two to seven players, but is meatier than a party game, while not being as overwhelming as a drawn out epic. It’s quick to play, and quicker to learn, and if you can prevent a runaway Science player, the options to win open up significantly. Throw in five or so expansions, and the possibilities multiply.
7 Wonders is one of the first games I ever purchased and I’ve never regretted it. It still gets played with my groups today, and whether that is building for the optimal point score, undermining your neighbours to make them financially dependent on you, or trying to use as many free building upgrades as possible, I find that everyone takes away something different from the experience, has a great time, and what more can you ask for from a board game?
Fun Fact: The 7 Wonders of the Ancient World are the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Temple of Artemis, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Of these only the Great Pyramid of Giza still remains to this day.