Takahe’s Solo Den: Messina 1347

You can always count me in if there is a new, super-dry euro on the horizon. Messina 1347 definitely falls into that category – sure, the game is based around the plague epidemic, however the core gameplay loop is designed to deliver a meaty euro experience first and foremost while the theme serves here as interesting albeit not-that-important flavour background. Am I complaining here? Absolutely not!

I mean, the designers’ previous title, Praga Caput Regni, is one of my favourite mid-to-heavy euros out there and just like Messina, the game -despite having beautiful art- does not speak too thematically to me (you want an example of a euro game with a strong theme? Try Stroganov). But oh boy the gameplay in that one is just so satisfying! Luckily the same can be said about Messina 1347 – a fantastic blend of euro-tropes served in a package that will certainly please a lot of euro-fans. But… let’s not jump ahead too far, shall we?

City of Messina board you build yourself at the beginning of the game

At its core, Messina 1347 is a worker placement and action selection game, with an engine building element added on top of it. You place and /or move your workers across the city, eradicating plague, rescuing citizens and activating the action depicted on the tile itself. You also manage your own countryside estate with your overseers who (through rescued citizens) allow you to execute another set of actions, essentially enabling you to do more than one thing during your turn. Aaaaaand, once you’re happy with how the rescued people helped you with your estate (that engine building aspect mentioned earlier), you can send them back to the city to repopulate it.

Estate board with overseers (red wooden tokens)

Sounds easy, right? The thing is – you will never ever be able to do everything. The game keeps track of your progress on 3 different scoring tracks called registers (plus one dedicated for victory points) and there is absolutely no way you’ll be able to max all of them in one game. Not even two if I dare to say! You will obviously try to score as much as you can on the popularity register through eradicating plague (it does score you bonus victory points in the end), however you will also ideally want to move forward on the other two as well as those will grant you additional workers and actions for your overseers on your estate board.

And you definitely need to utilise your own estate as much as possible as that’s the only way to do more than just one action during your turn. Moving overseers forward increases their “potency” so later on, one activated overseer can potentially allow you to do 3 additional actions (!). There is a catch, however. You need people in your estate in order to use more actions, so rescuing them as early as possible is very much a critical part of your first couple of rounds.

Scoring board with 3 registries and one VP scoring track

Wait, what about the plague and the epidemic, the thematic background for this game? Well, if you rescue a person from a plague-infested district, that person goes into quarantine and is unavailable for the next 2 rounds. However. You can build a small workshop near his quarantine facility to keep him busy… these small quarantine workshops only provide goods while someone is in quarantine though… so the moment the person leaves, those workshops stop producing. Speaking of workshops – you can also build bigger versions of these and send your people to work in them, thus providing you with additional goods at the end of the round, each round going forward.

And that’s not all – I haven’t even mentioned ships arriving at ports… these can also be cleansed of plague and claimed, giving you coins/VPs and the additional bonus of moving and activating any of your overseers should you collect a pair of them. Or the fact that you can “level up” your people to gain additional benefits in workshops, plus many city hexes require these upgraded citizens to be used to successfully repopulate the district.

There are just way too many options to choose from with not enough time/resources/workers at your disposal which will -unavoidably- lead to some solid moments of analysis paralysis.

But it’s precisely the variety of things you can do on your turn that makes this euro such a crunchy, brain-squeezing experience. This is not a euro that would constantly limit your progress because you don’t have XYZ resource (looking at you, Gaia Project!) – this is a meaty euro that offers players multiple paths to victory – if you don’t have enough fire/wood/coins... no problem, here are all these other, equally meaningful things you can do. I love when the heaviness of the game comes from the variety of options, not from a hamstrung resource management. Sure, you are not collecting dozens of resources here either – however these are not the only thing that will allow you to progress. And I like it – I like being in control and having multiple ways of getting those VPs.

In terms of the solo mode, this is your standard beat your own score affair – the included solo bot only places his workers to block districts and moves only on the plague-eradicating popularity track (for end-game bonus scoring) so in reality, all you have to worry about is have a potential contingency plan should the AI block the tile you were planning to claim. Other than that, the official victory condition (130 VPs) is not un-achievable and I myself have managed to reach it once already – however, you have to really push all the rescued citizens to their limits in order to reach those heights. So, it’s not something you’ll be hitting casually, which to me is a perfectly balanced target, similar to the one in Praga Caput Regni.

Messina 1347 is certainly not a ground-breaking game - but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth your time. It is a masterfully crafted dry euro that requires a solid strategy thinking and planning to really do well and score high. Worker placement, resource management, engine building… all of the gameplay mechanisms are fused together in very tight, smooth package, providing ample scoring opportunities without any serious flaws or dead ends. Sure, the competition in this genre is fierce… however, Messina 1347 is such a well-designed game that it clearly stands out as a gold-standard in its own category. In other words, if you like this level of complexity, you will most certainly have great fun playing this one!