Life and work are stressful; that’s why we need vacations that can clear the mind and invigorate our spirits with a sense of adventure, such as gem collecting in a sea of giant glowing jellyfish. Or how about being shrunken to insect size to explore wooded lands atop a galloping mouse? Such are two of the travel opportunities available to players in Braided Skies, a medium-weight competitive Eurogame for 1-4 players, playing in 60-90 minutes.
Braided Skies, designed by Dan Germain, is part of the magical Smoking Bones universe, created by Andrew (Everdell, Tapestry) and Willard Bosley, and it represents the first of a trilogy of board games in collaboration with Stonemaier Games that will accompany three graphic novels (also by the Bosleys).
As the introduction to the series, Braided Skies has players take on the role of rival airship captains hoping to transport tourists to magical wonders that they must discover throughout the Northlands. Featuring worker placement, exploration, and recipe fulfillment, will this gaming adventure soar to the great heights of its airships?
Gameplay Overview:
Braided Skies is primarily a worker placement game, and on their turn, players will either deploy one of their 3 airship workers or recall all of them. Notably, airships belong to 3 different classes (indicated by unique flags), and some placement spots require specific airship types.
The worker placement spots consist of four general varieties:
1. Places that help you build your engine
- Pay to expand your ship’s cargo hold capacity or acquire crewmates and harvesters for your ships
2. Resource collection ports
- Collect various types of resources, limited by your cargo hold capacity
- Possessing a harvester lets you collect extra
3. Wonder Visitation Spots
- Pay appropriate resources to fulfill any of the 3 visible wonders, recipe fulfillment style. Get rewarded with track bumps and acquisition of a Wonder Card that contains multiple tags of five varieties.
A selection of Wonder Cards are shown here. Each has a cost to the left, an instant and ongoing reward on the bottom, and point-scoring tags in the upper right corner. No 2 wonders are the same, and each contains unique artwork.
4. Victory Point Grabs
- Trade in certain types of resources for points
Recalling your airship workers is a puzzle unto itself and allows triggering of a variety of rewards. Each cargo spot on your playmat (up to 3 per airship) can potentially be activated for a reward if it is currently filled to capacity with resources. Rewards can include additional resources, points, track bumps, and more, and notably, these rewards can chain to allow activation of additional cargo spots.
A key element of the game is exploration. When certain resource collection ports are visited with upgraded worker-airships, the active player may reveal what’s beneath an adjacent cloud area to reveal a new worker placement spot. This also immediately triggers an event that typically results in a reward for the active player as well as placement of other rewards (point tokens or resources) on various worker placement spots of the shared board. The next player to visit one of these spots may claim those rewards.
Game-end is triggered in one of three ways—by one player reaching 60 in-game points, by a specific threshold being met on all 3 tracks by at least one player, or by one player discovering a 7th wonder. End-game points are earned for:
- Acquiring the greatest number of Heritage tags on Wonders
- For each tag type (culture, scenic, and adventure) on your wonders, sum the tags, and then apply the appropriate multiplier based on your position on each of the 3 Wonder tracks.
Game Experience:
Upon setting up Braided Skies, players will immediately be impressed by the production values and beautiful Bosley artwork. And there is plenty of artwork, with unique magical depictions on each of the 34 Wonder cards as well as 25 Encounter cards, which help draw players into the Smoking Bones universe.
As for the mechanics of the game, this is a medium-weight Eurogame with a central loop of collecting resources via worker placement and cashing them in recipe-fulfillment style. It will likely appeal to fans of games like Apiary and Everdell, although notably, the rules here are more straightforward, the resources less tight, and the final scoring less point-salady. The gameplay may not feel completely novel, but a couple of mechanics help set it apart.
Dual-Layer Engine Building
Part of your engine consists of permanent upgrades like expanding your cargo capacity, acquiring crewmates and harvesters, and deploying outposts around the central board. These upgrades never go away and will generally boost the efficiency with which you can collect resources and points. The other part of your engine is temporary and is triggered during recall actions. The more resources currently in your cargo hold during a recall, the better the rewards. You cannot keep your cargo hold full forever, though, as spending resources to acquire wonders or visit worker-placement spots that grant immediate points is ultimately where most of your final score gets tallied. Thus, Braided Skies is an interesting puzzle where you need to efficiently collect appropriate resources and then figure out the timing of when and which ones are worth trading in such that your next recall is as lucrative as possible.
Changing Valuation of Worker Placement Spots
New resource-collection worker placement spots get discovered in the clouds throughout the course of the gameplay, and there’s a bit of a race to do so for the random discovery reward. Each of these new spots is marginally better as you dig deeper into the two-layered clouds, and thus there can be a race to visit the more valuable new spots. Notably, every discovery results in either points or resources being randomly distributed to certain locations on the board, with collection being first-dibs. In higher player counts, these get snapped up rather quickly, and this feature introduces some swinginess as some players may be better situated to capitalize on these random boons. At two players, rewards tend to accumulate, potentially making certain spots extra lucrative, so much so that a basic resource accumulation spot may actually be better than one of the advanced ones. The constantly changing valuations of worker-placement spots forces players to constantly re-evaluate their action priorities and ordering thereof.
While the gameplay elements above do create some tension as well as a race-like element, it should be noted that the game still only feels mildly player-interactive—probably a similar level to that of Apiary. There are generally plenty of worker-placement spots available at all player counts, so the biggest source of interaction is racing to claim specific Wonder cards and valuable worker placement spots.
In addition to the random discovery events, the biggest impactors of replay value stem from unique abilities players build into their tableau from acquired wonders and cargo expansions. That being said, most of these cargo and wonder-based rewards are some combination of track bumps, resources, or points, and they tend not to feel as cool and specialized as the combos one might be able to create in a game like Apiary, Expeditions, or even Everdell. Heavier gamers may thus feel that the gameplay lacks some creative depth and could feel a bit samey after a couple of plays.
That isn’t to say that it’s obvious how to do well on your first play. While players have some control of the game-end trigger, it tends to end right when you’re starting to get truly powerful. Being efficient with every turn is key to doing well in this game that does not overstay its welcome.
Final Thoughts:
The beautifully imaginative artwork and stellar production values combined with not-too-tight resource management make Braided Skies an almost zen-like medium-weight gaming experience. And yet there’s also a fun tension created by needing to carefully craft a dual-layered engine and efficiently plan out worker-placement actions among spots that constantly change in value throughout the game. Braided Skies may not be as crunchy or offer as many unique and exciting card/tile combos compared to games like Apiary and Wingspan, but it is nonetheless a thoroughly enjoyable and smooth-playing efficiency puzzle that leaves you wanting to keep diving into the clouds to discover more.
Final Score: 3.5 stars – This smooth-sailing Eurogame sets a direct course to whimsically imaginative adventure
Hits:
• Outstanding artwork and overall production
• Dual-layer engine building
• Changing worker placement options throughout the game
Misses:
• The special abilities built into your tableau from wonders and cargo expansions are only so exciting
• Interaction may be too mild for some
• Some may dislike the randomness of the event rewards
