Takahe’s Solo Den: Wayfarers of The South Tigris
1 - 4 Players 60 - 90 Minutes Age: 12+
Designers: S J Macdonald, Shem Phillips"
Artist: Mihajlo Dimitrievski
Publisher: Garphill Games
Let me be brutally honest
I am not going to sugar-coat it: Wayfarers of The South Tigris is a disappointment for me. Haven’t played the game multiplayer (I will soon), but from a solo perspective, any game from “Of the West Kingdom” series is a better solo experience than this one. There. I had to get it out of the chest, no point teasing you my dear readers. Having said that though – I also think Wayfarers is potentially a wonderful medium to heavy weight Euro with some amazing decision-making space and combos you will be wanting to experience again, and again, and again.
Potentially. I just have to fix the malfunctioning solo mode first before I can truly see the greatness of this game. And… I might actually have an idea how to correct it, but that I will share with you later down the line. For now, let’s talk about what this game is briefly about and why that rude awakening on my part upon playing solo mode of it.
Strong foundations make for a fun, baseline game
Now, before I delve deep into what makes this game tick and what doesn’t, just quick note – I will be using comparisons with Viscounts / Paladins as those games have fantastic, human like, easy to manage and overall, very clever bots which I consider to be extraordinarily amazing and perhaps, even best of the best. Plus, I am a massive fan of the “of the West Kingdom” series, have all the expansions for all the games and played them countless times… so in other words, I know why they work so well. And because of that, I was expecting a similar level of polish and quality from Wayfarers…
And the game certainly delivered the polish, and the quality... but not consistently, across the whole board (pun intended) 😊. For starters, the mechanics and the gameplay loop are as addictive as ever. As usual for this genre, you are trying to score as many VPs as possible – to do so, you have to build up your tableau of land, water, space and inspiration cards, each one providing you with a tag/or tags that is/are counted towards the scoring and towards requirements on a journal track. You can also acquire townsfolk that give you benefits, once you tuck them under already “built” card – these vary from one-off bonuses upon meeting specific criteria (for each new open water you get XYZ) to bonuses you get should you use the card (if you activate the card, you get free provision etc.).
An addictive mashup of euro tropes
Apropos - using cards is another key element of this game. By placing a die on a card, and by meeting “tag” requirements (if card needs camel in your caravan, you need to use a die with a pip number that corresponds to camel on your board’s caravan section), you can acquire more cards, get influence in one of the guilds, or gain resources. You can also use workers available to you; this game only gives you 2, with an option of gaining a handful of additional ones, so unlike Paladins, worker placement is not as dominant here is it was there. Still, using workers mainly for gaining tiles into your caravan is pretty much a necessity because the basic setup really limits what you can do with your dice.
As already mentioned, influence and guilds are a nice little side-activity you can participate in – by placing your influence token on one of the guilds, you can then later spend that token to either modify your dice rolls, use it as a free “ship tag”… or do one additional journal action. Speaking of journaling, this is a track that dictates the length of the game – the faster you move through this track, the quicker the game ends. However, in order to move forward, you have to meet various “tag” requirements so if you do not plan your strategy well, if you do not build up your tableau properly, you might get “stuck” on this track, unable to move and gain some valuable bonuses, tiles and benefits.
Dissecting troubled solo…
Ok. That’s the game in a nutshell, let’s talk about the solo mode and why I think it’s sub-par (using just the vanilla rules and setup) compared to marvelous solo game implementations in “of the West Kingdom Series”. Wayfarers of the South Tigris comes with 4 bots, each specialising in a different aspect of scoring. One bot collects mainly townsfolk, another one is mostly grabbing tiles… and the other two are into space exploration and journaling. So, these 4 different bots give the player some solid variety in terms of difficulty, although I would have liked to see some additional modifiers too as these bots are all you get and there are no official rules for how to make them tougher or easier.
The difficulty, however, is not a problem here. The problem is how these bots operate. For starters, each bot get’s its own board and this board clearly describes bots priority matrix in terms of picking cards and tiles, and also what each bot does when facing specific icons (such as getting new dice or resources). The actions of the bots are driven by a set of 6 cards. That’s it. There are no specific AI cards for different specialisations of bots, you get 6 basic ones and done. Let me summarise it here – boards with explicitly described priorities and sequence of actions for each bot, and 6 simple, easy to follow, AI cards. Sounds like a solo-players dream, right? Streamlined, simple, elegant AI.
Wrong bot in the wrong game?
Sadly, this kind of bot seems to be a total misfire for a heavy, lengthy game like this one. Let me elaborate on that a bit more. Because of how simplified this solo AI is (especially compared to Paladins and Viscounts), the bot does not have to obey or follow any rules a normal player does. Remember when you were able to actively block the bot in Paladins from getting necessary attributes so they can’t place their garrison or convert a card from the display? Or how you could send bots’ workers in Architects to prison and score money for them? Or how bots in Viscounts had to have enough resources to do actions? No such interaction here, no such human-like behaviour here. Bots in Wayfarers just mechanically collect stuff, do their own thing, sometimes hindering your progress by forcing you to “pay” them for interacting with a specific card (though their influence token is placed on it)… but that’s it.
Because of how simplified and dumbed-down the bot in this game is, solo sessions are noticeably swingy and quite heavily influenced by luck and randomness. What do I mean by that? If a bot is lucky and chains the AI cards in a particular sequence, he just rushes though the journal track, taking the topmost or the bottom most path… and you have no way of stopping him. He ignores the “tag” requirements and if he has enough influence in one particular guild (which he mostly does), he journals twice. This actually happened to me twice (!!!), the bot constantly took the blue (upper) path, breezed through the journaling track and left me speechless, with just a bunch of landscape and water cards and a handful of VPs in the end.
Unfair and cheating AI
What made this situation worse however, is how incredibly cheaty, cheap and unfair the bot feels when grabbing cards and scoring them. Each time he does something, in most cases he ends up getting a card or a tile - doesn’t have to pay anything, meet any criteria… just grabs it like it was nothing. Watching how he grabs the most expensive space card by sheer luck, one which I would have to save a significant sum to be able to afford… makes my blood boil. With journaling, this usually means he also gets multiple cards/tiles because when he places a tile on his board, he (surprise - check the pic above this paragraph) also gets tons of stuff. Very frequently I found myself spending 5 minutes giving the bot cards/tiles/cards in one. Single. Turn… because of their luck. These cards then score them a flat amount of VP per type – let’s do some math to show you how broken this scoring is.
Each townsfolk gives the bot 1 VP (most bots usually grab lots of these), each land and water card scores them 2 points. Each space card 3 and each inspiration 4. They always gets at least 4 inspiration cards, which is flat out 16 points. 16 points for scoring inspiration cards is something you won’t be able to do easily and would require a solid amount of luck on your side (onto that later)! And remember, they don’t need to follow any scoring rules for land and water cards like normal player does – they just score those points for each card.
Now, if they collect 10 cards (doesn’t matter if land or water), they get 20 points. For you as a player, 20 points for land and water cards is a solid challenge to beat as you need to get multiples of each type (each new card costs you dice and provisions, which the bot ignores) BUT also try and get a variety of them. Now, scoring space and inspiration cards is a whole new level of luck and randomness. You need to match space cards with your strategy, otherwise those cards are wasted money and believe me, they are not cheap! Inspiration cards are like a lotto draw too – they are incredibly hard to get and if none of the available ones match your strategy, that’s 5-10 points lost. For the bot? Not a problem, he still gets his sweet VPs…
A potential crux of the problem…
After playing 8 games in just a few days (and not winning against the two easiest bots at all – and I did manage to score in 80s half the time!), I think I know where the problem is (besides the bot being a cheating and unfair bastard).
The problem is in the stale and stagnating display of cards available to you (and this has already been identified as in issue by several players - BGG forum here). In Paladins, once the round is done, you as a solo player refresh all the card displays by discarding 2-3 and replacing them with the new batch. There is no such cleanup in Wayfarers. If you or the bot do not take a card from the available ones, the display stays the same. For land, water and townsfolk cards, this is not a massive issue as you tend to take those cards anyway (you have to, no way around it) – but, the space cards and inspiration cards, are rarely touched and rarely refreshed. No wonder – as I have said already, space cards are very expensive so you don’t want to waste 4-5 coins on them unless those cards are really fitting into your strategy.
And this is a massive, super-frustrating problem as these cards are the ones providing an additional scoring opportunity which you absolutely need to utilise, otherwise you have 0 chance beating the bot. For example, during my playthroughs, I have only managed to get 1 (!!!) planet type space card because the other ones simply never showed up. Or, when I’ve decided to go for multiple city/open water cards and hoped to see a space card in display that would score me some additional point for my strategy… never happened because the available selection of cards just didn’t refresh at all.
Same story for comet cards (which are just a unique space cards) – only once I have managed to get 2 of those and it was still a waste of coins because the bot usually gets 6+ comets by default so you would ideally need 3-4 cards to beat them in bonus scoring… at minimum. With inspiration cards, the situation is even more dire – you can’t even buy these cards! You can only get them on rare occasions, and again, if the scoring condition does not meet your strategy (and there are tons of scoring conditions on these cards), you are out of luck.
Now, when you encounter this situation (and many already have) in a 2+player game, it is a nuisance but… the game is still fair because both you and the other player follow the same rules for scoring so both of you have to deal with crappy cards available to you. BUT. In solo mode, you are at a clear disadvantage because the bot simply does not care what they grab and they will score points for that card no matter what. And that’s why the problem of the stagnating market is so obvious and so frustrating in the solo game, and why I find the bot very unfair, it essentially cheats.
A house-rule that might help smooth the experience
Yeah, the solo game feels like a luck fest to be honest. If you are lucky, you get the scoring cards that match your strategy, you have a chance. If you are unlucky, inspiration cards do not match your strategy, you have 0 chance to beat the bot.
And you might be pointing out that I should be changing or modifying strategy mid-way or somethin’ – sorry but no, this game is not light, it is a heavy, resources stingy, engine building game where a good strategy from your initial setup really matters. It takes long and dedicated planning to acquire the cards, townsfolk and tiles you need to get your engine running, you can’t just stop and change it half-way through the game because the cards in the display are not in your favour… and you also need to keep in mind all the tag requirements on the journal track. This lack of refresh of cards on the display is a clear oversight from the designer, one that I intend to rectify by introducing some house-rules. But I shouldn’t be doing so, right?
Want one of the best solo Euros? Look elsewhere - or better yet - try “of The West Kingdom” games!
As it stands now, I can’t recommend Wayfarers purely for solo play – especially if you’re not going to house-rule the stale market. I will try another few games with an added rule of discarding two corner cards from each group whenever someone does journalling. This might allow me to catchup to the cheating bot by getting a good mix of space and inspiration cards, which can really make a difference if matched well.
Without this house-rule, the game is just not fun, you don’t feel like you are in full control of your success, the bot just amasses tons of cards and if they’re lucky, ends the game without you having any chance of beating them. I am hesitant to say this bot is broken… but it certainly is a much more random, luck based and swingy solo AI than previous iterations in Paladins and Viscounts. So, if you are thinking of getting this game purely for solo, I’d suggest getting either Viscounts or Paladins instead. Better bots, less luck and randomness… and definitely more fun!
