Bohemians

• Designer: Jasper de Lange
• Illustrations: Tomasz Jedruszek, Mateusz Kopacz, Roman Kucharski, Hanna Kuik
• Publisher: Portal Games
• Players: 1-4 (competitive, solo, and 2p co-operative modes)
• Age: 14+
• Time: 45-60 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4ozRfLB
• Played with the review copy provided by the publisher

Portal Games tends to publish games with crunch that reward numerous plays. Bohemians is a beautiful game on the lighter end of their range. Mixing deck building, action points, card programming, and a form of action chaining, Bohemians is a game beginners can play, but experienced gamers will be able to combo their way to success.

Bohemians is a race game to a certain number of Achievement cards, five cards for 2 & 3 players and four cards for 4 players.  Like other deck builders, achievement cards are bought at the same time as other cards. Unlike other deck builders, they don’t clog up your deck and even give you ongoing benefits we’ll discuss later. After someone has triggered the game end, you finish the round with atelier points, discussed later, as the tiebreaker.

Bohemians is largely a card game with player boards and an atelier board. There are four types of cards in Bohemians, habit, muse, hardship, and achievement. Habit are things you do, such as ‘find focus’ or ‘wander the streets aimlessly’.  Muses are people who inspire you when doing these things, such as Dominique who ‘makes you see your worth’. Muses are played under habit cards in your tableau of four habit slots (morning, afternoon, evening, and night). The resulting tableau could be four habits wide with muses under habits where they can be legally played.

When playing your tableau of cards, you can decide to do bohemian things for all four parts of the day or go to work for one of them and be boho for the other three.  There are substantial benefits to not working, but also if you do work, you won’t gain a hardship card, such as ‘Perfectionism’ or ‘Malnutrition’.  These cards go into your deck like habits and muses, but cause problems when they reappear. Instead of work being a card, it is a tile and always available, so every day you have to decide if you will go to your Cabaret Attendant job or skip it and gain a hardship.

How to Play

Much like the game itself, the game turn has four phases, drawing cards (simultaneous), programming your day (simultaneous), relating your day and getting new cards (in turn order), and cleanup (simultaneous).

Like many deck builders, you draw five cards, but in Bohemians, muse and hardship cards don’t count towards that limit, so you might end up drawing two muses, one hardship, and five habit cards.

You then place those on your player board so all four parts of the day have a habit card or your work tile.  You then play muse cards below habit cards.  These all earn you benefits in the next phase.

After everyone is done programming their day, the first player narrates what they did that day.  For example, “I woke up and locked myself in my room, then in the afternoon I worked on a manifesto.  In the evening, I worked as a Journalist before I spent my evening embracing the unexpected”  This narration helps the mood and accents definitely add to the charm. A less productive day might be waking up to wander the streets aimlessly before daydreaming, then getting into the mood for composing and composing without stopping into the night. [note the absence of work, which might lead to a drinking habit].

The narration phase brings out the flavor of the game but it is also the process you use to count up how much inspiration you generated that day.  Inspiration, one of the two currencies, is created by linked bubbles between cards, like in After Us, as well as modifiers on the habit and muse cards and color bonuses from the tableau board, as different players like to start and end their day with different activities. Finally, you may have to reduce your inspiration by any hardships you drew that turn.

The inspiration points can be used to buy habit, muse, and achievement cards from the central tableau of four face up habit cards, four face up muse cards, and the stack of increasingly expensive achievement cards.  If you have remaining inspiration point or choose not to buy cards,you can convert the remainder into atelier points, the second currency.  Atelier points are spent during the relevant phase and help with luck mitigation and deck thinning.  You can spend atelier points to draw more cards at the start of the turn, Ignore a hardship, clear the market during your turn, or reject (trash, not just discard) a card at day end.

Finally, everyone cleans up their tableau board, sets aside their job tile to use again if they choose to, pass the start player token, and the new start player can clear a card from the central market and it is immediately replaced.

You continue day after day until someone has the requisite number of achievement cards, then finish the round.

Theme, Art, and Design

There is a reason this game was picked up by a company that talks about ‘games that tell stories’. Every day of Bohemians is a story.  While the starting deck is mild, such as ‘finding focus’ and writing in your journal’, the habit cards you purchase are more exciting, such as ‘talk with an intriguing stranger’, ‘go to a brothel’, and ‘predict the end of art’.  Yes, there are some somewhat adult cards in the game, so if you don’t want to discuss ‘making love with abandon’ or ‘hypersexuality’ with your ten-year-old, this might not be the family game you are looking for.  We’ll leave other cards for you to discover and enjoy

The color chosen and the spirit of the art is fantastic.  It has a joie de vivre that brings the hopes and dreams of the characters we play to life. There are emotions expressed and knowing glances captured in the illustrations that bring the theme alive. In addition the colors chosen have a joy and brightness without being garish or gaudy.

I have not evaluated the cards for color-blind players, but expect that others will raise it if it is an issue. Beyond the mature themes, the cards do not depict an explicitly multi-cultural world, but hew closely to the traditional vision of the time and place.  While many of the muses are women, there are men and things, such as the moon and the Seine.  The player colors are only relevant in one spot, the player markers on the atelier board. These markers are different from all the other colors in the game, but there are no reminder markers to help you remember which color you are. 

 
Feelings from the Opinionated Gamers:

Jonathan F:

The game feels very good. It is enjoyable to play, and there is plenty of substance below the fluffy theme and whimsical art. It is not hard to grok, but it requires situational awareness to choose the right card to draft or when to spend that inspiration on atelier points to thin your deck. There is a slight tension between needing the decks to have time to power up and the game lasting a bit too long. I think playing it several times before house ruling makes sense. We found some cards that seemed too strong in one play, but then were just fine in the next one.  There is one habit card that lets you spend atelier points in addition to inspiration points to buy achievement cards – we are not sure if one is too strong, but time will tell.  In addition, as it will be in Beta on BGA soon, Portal will have the data they need to make any tweaks.

Turn order feels quite relevant because the achievement cards ramp up, so the first one costs 8, then 9, then 10, then 11 and then it varies depending on number of players.  Going earlier in the turn order can be the difference between getting an achievement card or not. In addition, as you can only buy one achievement card per turn (by rule and practicality), an early lead can make it hard to catch up. In addition, each achievement card gives you a one atelier point discount once per turn, so the ideal card can be out there and the player can hate-flush them for free if they have three achievement cards. In other words, don’t get too attached to the cards in the market until it is your turn.

There is a slight dissonance as you narrate your day to the others, then immediately do the arithmetic needed to calculate your points, which you likely did during the programming phase. All the levity of the theme runs smack into ‘discipline yourself’ next to ‘compose without stopping’ = 3 inspiration. I have no idea how better to merge the games ethos and its mechanisms.

I strongly recommend Bohemians for an after-dinner weeknight game among friends. It often hits the perfect notes and even comes with solo and 2p co-op modes for date night.


Dale Y:

So, this has been my most played and talked about game at SPIEL so far. It was the first game that I played (on my traditional Tuesday night gamenight here), and I was immediately drawn to the game from the get-go.  The striking cover art is simply fantastic.  As we were learning the game – a process that didn’t take too long – the art of the different cards was also very noticeable.  It appears that nearly every card has its own illustration, and they were all gorgeous and helped add to the mood/theme of the game.

The mechanics of the game are detailed well by Jonathan above, and as I mentioned earlier, it’s quite easily to pick up and grok. Each player starts with a basic deck (all slightly different), and as players get randomized player boards and jobs – the setup for every game will be slightly different.  Each color feels like it has a slightly different thrust in its card actions, though I am not fully certain yet due to lack of experience.

In each hand, there is a small but interesting puzzle of matching up the symbols as best that you can.  Added into this is the risk/reward of deciding whether to play a fourth card (to get more matches) or to play your occupation tile (to prevent gaining a hardship).  Let me tell you, those hardship cards can be quite brutal.  Figuring out how to be ready to remove or ignore a hardship card turned out to be one of my main focuses each turn.

As the game plays out, there is some feeling of deckbuilding as you will be adding a card to your deck on most hands.  At first it didn’t feel like there was as much of a chance to cull your deck, though players did start liberally using the Atelier action to remove a card (though expensive at 6 points) as well as finding the Muses which could eliminate their paired cards.  As you manage the cards in your deck, you’ll be more likely to get good combinations to come up together as well as likely getting more cards in your hand of the two colors that give you bonus inspiration.  

With my limited number of plays, it’s hard to give a rating yet – but, this is also a game that I’m ready to play again immediately – and I have 70+ new games in my bags right now!  So, that definitely says something about it… I will definitely be looking forward to playing this more in the upcoming months.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!   Dale 
• I like it.  Jonathan
• Neutral. 
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4ozRfLB