The Druids of Edora

The Druids of Edora had sat on the shelf long enough that I approached it expecting a fairly slight variation on familiar design territory. It is not that. What arrived instead was a proper optimisation puzzle: polite in presentation, ruthless in the way it makes you recalculate the whole board.

Its engine is built around economy of action. Each move needs to connect with the resources, stones, counters and tokens already available, so that one decision sets up the next rather than merely occupying part of a plan. The first look can be overwhelming; there are many small pieces of information to hold at once, and the game does not initially arrange them into an especially friendly picture.

Once play begins, though, the structure settles nicely. The interesting decision is how to turn that spread of options into a joined-up scoring plan without committing yourself to a single route to points. It asks you to combine objectives and account for every action; this is not the sort of game where an early trick can simply be repeated until the end.

A player aid for the potions would have saved some needless searching through its small-token universe, but that is a modest complaint beside how smoothly the design ultimately runs. For players who enjoy substantial scoring and genuine optimisation pressure, The Druids of Edora is very good and deserves better than a place on the shelf.