Tournay Review

Year Published: 2011

Players: 2-4

Playing Time: 30-60 Minutes

Tournay – The Premise

Fans of the game will push back on my description of it as “Troyes, The Card Game,” and we’ll talk about some of the differences later. But I do think that’s an acceptable shorthand response that will give a lot of modern gamers a sense of what the gameplay feels like.

Set in a neighboring medieval city, Tournay features three types/colors of cards (Yellow/Civil; Red/Military; White/Church) with different powers and abilities. In the game, you’ll be purchasing cards from various stacks, I, II and III of each color, and adding them to your own personal tableau. From this tableau, you’ll build an engine to acquire resources, extra actions, combat event cards that can harm one or more players, occasionally hinder your opponents, and ultimately gain victory points.

RELATED: Troyes Review

The art and theme are nearly identical to Troyes, giving the proceedings a familiar vibe to fans of its older brother.

How the Game Plays

This is the only review I’ve done that I’ve ONLY played digitally. There are reasons for this, as we’ll talk about later. But my only plays – and really, most of the plays that exist for this game at all anymore – are on Board Game Arena (BGA).

I’ll be honest, calling it “Troyes, The Card Game” fits like a glove for me. It scratches much the same itch, and much of the mechanical DNA remains intact. The primary mechanic that it ditches is the dice rolling. Those who love Troyes will also love the dice mechanics, as they’re central to the game. So something may be lost there. However, the ways in which you can benefit from and/or hinder your opponents are still present, if a bit more oblique. You’ll acquire rampart cards to protect against nasty event cards, which you may want to leave untouched so they harm your opponents more than you. And you’ll occasionally be purchasing real estate on their cards or forcing them to eliminate options on their tableau as a result of your actions.

It’s got a lot of Euro trappings, including worker placement/action selection, tableau building, and ramping up an engine as you purchase more powerful and higher scoring cards, but it’s also very interactive. Much like Troyes (which is a good thing, in my book).

So if this is simply a distilled variation on a well-loved game, why does no one know it exists? That question brings us to…

Iconography

Troyes has some weird iconography that can make learning card abilities a little rough. However, you’re never having to learn more than a handful in a game, and they’re parsed out over the first few rounds. It’s manageable. Tournay, on the other hand, is an avalanche of obtuse icons that all refer to near-unique abilities and uses.

Your tableau will have at least 6-7 cards by the end, and depending on game flow could include 12-15. Adding to this, so will each of your opponents, and because of some cards’ abilities, you have to pay attention to each tableau if you want to play strategically. It’s…a lot to take in.

The only reason I can play this game is because BGA includes mouseover text for each card, and because I’ve learned I only enjoy it at 2P. Even after several plays, I need to use the mouseover text constantly to remind myself of abilities and how they interact (as well as those of my opponent(s)).

I frankly can’t imagine playing this while having to refer to a manual in the same way. Or rather, I can, but I can’t imagine being able to teach it to anyone and have them enjoy it on their first few plays, which is all the chance many games get these days before they’re relegated to collecting dust.

And there’s the problem, I think. Some gamers are willing to give a game multiple plays to sink in. Given the bevy of options we have, though, and had even in 2011, first impressions matter. I wasn’t “enjoying” Tournay for a handful of plays. While I think we should be more willing to give games time to reveal themselves to us, that’s just not how things work a lot of times. So is this problem really a huge sin? Probably not. But will it mean a lot of copies will sit unplayed? Absolutely. And that’s the true problem.

I’ve seen other games compared to this one that have similarly obtuse icons, yet gamers don’t seem to have a problem with them. While I think the chief mistake there is that you’re rarely having to absorb so much all at once even in other “bad icon” games to make informed decisions, it’s a fair comparison to make at times. For my own two cents, I think a lot of games get a pass that present themselves confusingly, when they shouldn’t get that pass. Maybe the hobby was collectively too hard on Tournay for this, but I can’t say it didn’t bother me (and bothered others, clearly).

I can’t find another reason why this game was such a dud when it was released, so I really do think this is a game-killing flaw, and one that makes it hard to recommend in a general sense.