Stonespine Architects

• Designer: Jordy Adan
• Publisher: Thunderworks Games
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 10+
• Time: 45-60 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3NkzRtY
• Review copy provided by publisher

Dungeon-crafting is an ancient minotaur art that you’ve studied for a decade under Master Hortgully. To demonstrate your skill, as your final project you must carve your own perilous labyrinth into the base of the Stonespine Mountains.

Stonespine Architects is a card-drafting game in which 1-5 players compete to construct the most dangerous labyrinth.

Players simultaneously draft and play cards to expand their dungeons, one chamber at a time. Follow a unique blueprint and a variety of scoring challenges. Choose between mapping a path through your underground passages, placing key elements in your rooms, or searching for extra treasure.

Spend gold between rounds to customize your labyrinth with monsters, traps, treasures, and secret passages. At the end of four years, the player with the most perilous dungeon will earn the title of Master Architect!

To set up the game, place the tracking board on the table, and randomize the player markers on the Priority Track.  Position on this track will then determine each player’s starting position on the Gold track.  One goal card is placed on the space on the board and Challenge cards are set up in a row next to the board. 

Finally, set on Market cards and fill the spaces on the card with tokens of matching shape to the spaces on the card.

Each player gets a dungeon frame as well as a blueprint card.  Each player puts a doorway marker on the space indicated by the map on their blueprint card.  Each player then is dealt a hand of five chamber cards.

The game will  be played over 4 rounds, and in each round, each player will fill one row of chamber cards.  Thus, at the end of the game, the player’s 4×4 grid will be full with 16 tiles.  In each round, there are three phases: Construction, Improvement and Cleanup.

In the Construction phase, players choose a card from their hand and place it face up in their dungeon in the top most available row.  They then pass their hand around the table and repeat the process with their new hand.  Continue this until each player has placed four tiles in the top available row.  The final card from their hand is simply discarded.

When you play a card, it goes in any empty space.  You do not have to match doors on other tiles or the frame.  After the first round, you will cover up the bottom portion of the card in the row above it so that the dungeon art lines up.

In the Improvement phase, players first calculate how much gold they have – seen at the bottom of the cards in the current row in their dungeon plus one coin per treasure chest found on any cards in their dungeon.  Each player moves their marker on the gold track to their current total.

Then players take turns to either buy a token or pass to collect a challenge card – the player with the most gold gets to take action (ties broken by priority marker).  If you choose to buy tokens, buy any set of tokens on a market card.  The tokens are immediately placed into cards in that player’s dungeon.  When placing tokens, there are four spaces per card that can accept a token, but you cannot cover a previously placed token nor an item already pre-printed in a space on a card.

Then the player with the new highest total gets to go.  If a player chooses not to buy tokens, they pass and lose all their gold – moving their marker to zero.  Then, they take any unchosen challenge card and then move their priority marker into the first available slot.

In the cleanup phase, the Market is refreshed with new cards and new tokens are placed on them. New challenge cards are dealt out after Years 1 and 2.  Each player is dealt a new hand of five cards for the upcoming year.

At the end of Year 4, the game moves into Final Scoring. The following things are scored:

• Final Priority Order 
• Goal card – 15 / 9 / 5 points based on how well you fulfill the goal card
• Challenge cards – each player scores their three challenge cards they picked up
• Chamber Reputation – add up the positive and negative stars in their dungeon cards
• Blueprint – score up to 20 points for meeting the criteria laid out on the blueprint card
• Dungeon Paths – Score 1 point for each room connected by path to your entrance, and score 1 point for each room connected by path to your exit.

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of final priority.

My thoughts on the game

Stonespire Architects is a fun game where you try to solve the puzzle of how to construct the best dungeon.  There are a number of different ways to score points, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to succeed at all the different criteria, so you’ll have to pick and choose what you are striving for.  The process will be made more difficult due to the fact that you have to draft cards in each Year – and you will be competing with your fellow players for those cards.

The cards have multiple uses, and some will be valuable for the paths on them while others will provide treasure chests or creatures that are worth points.  Even if you don’t get the features you want on your cards, there’s always the opportunity to buy an appropriate improvement later in the Year should you have enough gold…  You should keep an eye out on the market though – because the tokens are randomly drawn at the start of each year, so you’ll know what’s available for you to buy.  If those tokens don’t seem to fit into your plans, maybe you should ignore the gold cards in this year and focus on something else?

In the improvement phase, you’re now tasked with the decision of whether to buy things to improve your dungeon – though getting out earlier gives you a much better selection of the Challenge cards.  And depending on the layout and contents of your dungeon, some Challenge cards can really pay off in the final scoring.  It’s a tough decision at times because once you take the Challenge card, you can’t buy any more tokens…

The game plays fairly quickly.  Each individual turn doesn’t take too long – pick the best card and slap it into your dungeon.  With all the different ways to score, I find that this actually works against analysis paralysis as most plays will provide me positive points, and that’s usually enough for me.  In my games, we tend to just agree to not look at what everyone else is playing on a particular turn – and this helps move things along as well.  As the game reaches its conclusion, things get a little tighter – as the decisions are now more crucial.  That being said, the process is still the same – just choose a card and play it.

The overall difficulty of the puzzle is moderate at best, but it’s a very enjoyable puzzle to work through.  The drafting and the competition for the market keep all the players involved in the game and interacting with each other.   

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Mark Jackson (10 plays): The solo game changes up some of the parameters for scoring and uses an opponent deck to let you know what kinds of dungeon plans he is collecting… and the necessary symbology is already built unobtrusively into the main deck cards. The solo player takes a packet of cards, draft one (and place it in their dungeon), keep one (to keep it out of the hands of the “bad guy” and/or be ready to play it next turn), and then add any cards with the matching symbol for your nemesis to his score pile. The remaining cards are discarded and new cards are drawn.

There’s more to the game (how the “bad guy” scarfs up monsters & traps from the market, for example)… but you can easily see how building things you need can conflict with keeping stuff the automata wants from him.

This has a bit of “overhead” correctly running and scoring the automata – but compared to games like Dungeon Alliance or Mosaic (both games I love to play solo), it’s comparatively simple.

I’ve been surprised with how well the automata challenges me in this one – and I haven’t even leveled up to the “legendary” solo cards yet.

Interestingly, despite having the largest table footprint for solo play, it’s actually a relatively short game (clocking in at about 20-25 minutes).

Dan B (1 play): It probably makes a decent solo game. As a competitive game I did not care for it. The challenge cards don’t seem very well-balanced and are a major source of points. Having players buy in descending money order generally means players who didn’t pick money tiles early get screwed. Etc. The graphic design is also not ideal (things on tiles don’t match things on cards well enough) but that’s a minor issue.It’s just short enough – and I like what it is trying to do well enough – to avoid a “not for me” rating.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Steph H
• I like it. Dale Y, Alan H, Mark Jackson
• Neutral. Dan B
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3NkzRtY