Big chunky die. Big chunky dice rolling across a board with a danger of destroying everything in their path kind of dice. The kind of dice you would stick under a table to stop it from rocking kind of dice. The kind of dice you could take to a social event as your plus one. Forges of Ravenshire has a lovely set of big chunkies that you can roll around to you hearts content as you attempt to become the best blacksmith in the town of Brocdour, and wtf is with that name? But any ways, time to move on.
Forges is about choosing dice, losing dice, running guilds and completing contracts in order to gain the most amount of gold and therefore the biggest reputation. As you know, people with the most money are always the most competent at any job, or anything for that matter. I'll not be taking questions on this.
On your turn, you'll place your dice in various slots in the village in order to gain resources, and then take a dice from a different point in the village and gain more resources before placing the dice in your guild machine to create even more resources. If you don't like the resources you've created then you can use the market exchange to convert resources to the one that you require. Can you believe that even though I'm typing the word resources so many times, I'm still getting the spelling of it more than I should. Absolute amateur I tell you. Trip to Human Rerources on the cards.
Production then steps in to allow you to use all of the goods you've collected to fulfil contracts or rerun your guilds and collect all of that lovely gold or increase your reputation within the village, then you'll reset and run everything again for the next season until you've gone through the entire year. You won't mind spending an entire year in Ravenshire because the place is gorgeous looking. I do like it when someone makes that additional bit of effort to make their game shine on a practical level and with Forges the recessed boards and the extra chunky dice alongside the decent thickness tokens give the correct impression that you've got yourself a premium product. While it has no bearing on the game in any way, the fact the protagonists are all animals adds that little bit of extra charm. Overall Forges is a game where they've gone for Baby bear's porridge, with production decisions sitting in the 'just right camp'. With a delicious dollop of honey on top.
The main mechanics are simple to understand and it's easy to pick up the game's main thrusts after only a couple of rounds of play, the market exchange allows you to mitigate any potential blunders that you've made in previous rounds, and the guilds ensure that you're quickly able to build a flow of resources coming into your own personal forge.
While there is a push to use as many players as possible in a game, the sweet spot for Forges is two or three. The production phase can become a simultaneous affair once everyone knows what they are doing, as they are only ever working from their own player boards. The Gathering phase can be a time killer and only because of the smaller number of spaces you are working with. The dice you have to work with are likely to change very quickly between your previous turn and your next turn as the other three players take and return dice from different spaces on the board. This unfortunately can lead to a decent amount of down time during the Gathering section.
When the board state is only relevant to you just before your turn, it has an unfortunate number of negative effects. Firstly, your turn is never going to speed up as the game goes on. No amount of understanding or experience is going to change the fact that you'll always making your decision on what to take at the point it is your turn. While you'll get a handle on the admin of the production mechanics, you still always be in a state of having to think on your feet when it comes to the Gathering phase. Secondly, it easy to just lose focus on the game at higher player counts because there's little point paying attention until it is your go. As the game goes on and choices really start to matter as plans come to fruition, the Gathering turns can increase in time. It's something to be wary of at higher players counts and in my opinion, it's not worth adding in dummy players to increase the count.
At two players, with increased choices and a smaller chance of your dice choices been taken out of play, the pace on Forges can really pick up and so it spends less time at the table. That's not something to be celebrated, as the overall package on offer here is of high quality, everything from the art, to the player boards, to well thought out manual screams that thought and time has been spent. Especially on the dice, which in an ideal world would have a fruit like smell.
Forges of Ravenshire is a decently fun time and works well as a resource management and conversion game, and offers more reasons to paws than reasons to pause. Those looking for a full table should heed my words above, but even with that being considered, it's a fine offering for those looking for badgers and anvils. And those chunky dice. Those chunky chunky dice..
This review is based on the retail version of the game provided to us by the designer and publisher. We were not paid monetary compensation for this review. We give a general overview of the gameplay and so not all of the mechanical aspects of the game may be mentioned.
The majority of the games that we are play are going to take a reasonable number of sessions and playthroughs to fully understand every possibility that they offer. We hope this write up gives you an idea of whether or not this game is something that you will consider playing or even add to your collection.
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