Six Sojourns

• Designer: Ryan Laukat
• Publisher: Red Raven Games
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30-60 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3RgKO59
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Six Sojourns is a reimagining of Eight-Minute Empire. It’s a short area control game full of tough choices, creative strategy and tactics, and high player interaction.

Your goal in Six Sojourns is to grow your family and broaden their influence. Players take turns selecting a card from five on display. Each card has actions that let players build houses, gain ships, move, and gain new family members. The cards also have special abilities and sets of icons that represent your family’s expertise in various trades: cooking, carpentry, sewing, shoe-making, art, blacksmithing, and jewelry. Each game, you only select nine cards, and you’ll be faced with meaty choices each turn as you focus on trades, abilities, or the map.

When all players have 9 cards, the game ends. Players count victory points and the player with the most points wins.  Each sojourn adds new cards and rules to the game. You can customize your experience by playing the six journeys as a campaign or play through each sojourn in order!

To set up, place the board on the table (you can choose either side), The rules suggest adding in at least one expansion set; select one and gather the needed components.  Shuffle the base cards, and then deal one card out per slot along the side of the board.  Each player gets the pieces in their color and 12 coins.  A starting player is chosen. Now players must return some of their tower pieces based on turn order.  The last player in order returns all of them, and each preceding player loses one fewer.  A starting space is chosen, and all players place 1 house and 2 people on that space.  The rules recommend that the start space be on the largest island and next to the sea, but any space could be used.

The game lasts 9 rounds. In each round, players will choose a card to keep.  There are five cards available for sale on the side of the board, the cost for the card is shown next to it (0 to 4 coins).  Choose the card you want, pay the cost, and play the card in front of yourself. Each card provides one or more trade icons.  Most cards also come with a special ongoing ability which is active as soon as you take the card. Slide all unpurchased cards down towards the 0 cost space and draw a new card in the 4 coin slot.  

Now, perform the actions on the new card.  If there are multiple actions, you can do them in any order. Furthermore, you can even split one action up and do a different one in the middle of the first.  You are not obligated to do the actions, you can always ignore them.  Action possibilities:

• Build a House – place a house on any space that has at least one of your people and no other houses.   
• Gain People – place people on any space with your house on it
• Build a Boat – place a boat on any sea space that is adjacent to a land space with one of your people on it.  You can build the boat and store it on your card to build on a future turn
• Move – Move your people and/or boats.  A move entails choosing any space on the board and then moving any number of people/boats from that space to an adjacent space.  In general, people stay on land and boats stay on water.  You can have people cross a sea by moving from land onto a sea space with a boat on it and then to a different adjacent land space.  If it is your boat, it’s a free move. If it is an opponent’s boat, you pay them a coin per move action. They cannot refuse to help you. You can only move across a single boat space.  The entire crossing costs one move action.

At the end of your ninth (and final) turn, you may place your towers.  You can place them in any space on the board that you currently control (i.e. you have more people or boats there than any other player.  Houses are worth 2 people).  A space with a tower is permanently under your control for the rest of the game regardless of what happens to the pieces in that space.

Once all players have 9 cards (and placed all their towers), you score the game.  

• Spaces – one point per space controlled.  No points awarded for ties
• Islands – one point for controlling more spaces on an island than any other player
• Trades – score points for each trade type
• Cards – score points from cards if you meet the criteria

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the most coins left over.

What I’ve described above is the single basic game.  There are also plenty of expansion modules that can be added in as you desire.  The rules actually suggest that you include at least one expansion in even a starting game.

• PLACES focuses on controlling specific places on the map. Each map has its own set of cards indicated by letter: A, B, C, etc. 
• TRADES TOKENS adds valuable trade tokens on the map that you can claim. 
• SPECIALTIES adds new cards to the deck with trades-focused objectives. 
• UPGRADES adds cards that allow players to increase or reduce the value of sets for all players! 
• SEA SERPENTS adds sea serpent tokens and cards to the game, which players can place on sea spaces to collect coins from other players and increase the value of sea spaces. 
• VALUES gives value cards to players, with special abilities and objectives unique to each player. 
• FEUDS makes contested spaces worth more points. 
• EXPLORATION adds explore tokens to the map that players can claim to gain bonuses. 
• MOUNTAINS adds mountain tokens, which create new obstacles on the board. 
• SHRINES add shrine tokens, which players can build to increase the value of spaces on the board. 
• AIRSHIPS adds a airship tokens that lets you move to any space on the board! 

You can also play a campaign of six games, each one adding in a new set of expansions for new challenges at every turn.  (Hence the title of Six Sojourns…)

My thoughts on the game

I have always turned to Red Raven games when I’ve looking for a narrative game fix (and I’m definitely awaiting Song of Silveranth!), but I was still happy to take a look at their more traditional Euro games.  Six Sojourns is a re-imagining of Eight Minute Empire, a quick card drafting game from back in 2012.   This new version takes the area control game and gives it a few more layers.  You’ll definitely not be finishing this game in 8 minutes per player now, but honestly, I love all of the additions, and this is a great game in that 30-45 minute time frame.

The game combines the tough decisions of buying/drafting cards from the market, the area control battle on the board, the set collection aspect of the trades and bonus card fulfillment.   There is also the money management aspect as you’ll need coins if you want to keep buying the cards closer to the start of the market.  With so many things to consider, it’s very rare to find a single card in the market that is perfect for you – and as such, it leads to some really interesting and tough decisions to be made as you have to prioritize your goals.

You only get 9 turns in the game, and only a single card in each turn – so you really have to make the most of each decision.  It’s honestly impossible to get everything done that you want – so you’ll always be watching what everyone else is doing, trying to figure out what you can postpone for a later turn while you accomplish something else now.  Sometimes your plans get a bit derailed as you might have to even react to pressure from your opponents.

For me, I love the constant conflict of trying to figure out the best option each turn.  Again, you only have 9 cards in the whole game, so you may end up having to alter your strategy based on the cards available to you.  There will always be 5 cards in the market, but depending on your coin reserves, it may be functionally less.  This turns out to be a good thing as far as game flow.  Knowing that the card supply on your turn is fixed, and sometimes you really can’t even look at all of them… it limits the amount of time that it takes to look over your options and then choose the card that works best.

Scores are usually in the 40s to 50s for me, and this does make you strongly consider each three and four point bonus card when they come up.  It’s definitely not a small factor in your final total.  Near the end of the game, it may also be worthwhile to look around and see if you can tie an opponent somewhere to take away one of their bonus cards.

Speaking of the end of the game, I must say that I really do like the tower system used here to mitigate the last player advantage.  While it’s probably still best to have the hammer – being able to lockdown a few spaces is great.  For me, it’s often used to guarantee that I control spaces which I need for bonus scoring or to take away temptation from a later player from trying to move into my space, thus freeing them up to go aggro against a different opponent on their final turn.

Every game will be a little different as you have two sides of the board to play (Each with a different map) and you have the choice of which expansion modules to throw into each game.  The rules do have a lot of good suggestions, or I suppose you could just throw them in randomly.   Each has a different feel, and some change the way you approach the game more than others.  I’ve really liked exploring the game with the little tweaks thrown in by each 

We have yet to undertake a true Six Sojourns campaign, but I’m itching to do so – hopefully playing one game per week with my regular group.  To get a feel for how it would go, here is a suggestion from the rules:

• SOJOURN 1: “Enchanting Sites” Places A 
• SOJOURN 2: “Learn from the Masters” Places B and Trades Tokens 
• SOJOURN 3: “Golden Age” Any map, Trades Tokens and Specialties 
• SOJOURN 4: “Wild Rumors” Places B, Trades Tokens, and Upgrades 
• SOJOURN 5: “Unknown Paths” Places A, Exploration, and Sea Serpents 
• SOJOURN 6: “Feuding Families” Places B, Exploration, Values, Sea Serpents, Feuds 

I’m playing and reviewing the Retail Edition, which is amazing with 13 different modules in it.  But wait, there’s more!  There is a deluxe edition that includes four more maps and at least 2 other expansion modules in it.  After my experience with the starter kit, I’m definitely interested in finding out more about the deluxe version!  The Deluxe version also adds a solo mode – and man, I’d love to give that a try as well.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Larry:  I haven’t had the chance to play Six Sojourns, but I did play Eight-Minute Empire a few times when it first came out.  Although a bit lighter than my usual fare, I found it to be clever and enjoyable and a good palate cleanser between heavier games.  It would definitely be interesting to see how Laukat has enhanced the systems with this new release.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Dale Y, John P
• I like it.
• Neutral.
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3RgKO59