Belfort Review

I don’t know if I have ever just come out and said it before, but I love worker placement games. I just adore the mechanic and if a game includes it, the chances of me liking it are quite good. Belfort is an older game now (almost 10 years old!) so does it still excite and deliver the goods when so many other great worker placement games have been produced since it debuted?

The winner of Belfort is the player who, at the end of seven rounds of play, earns the most Victory Points (VP). Players will earn victory points by having majority of buildings claimed within the five districts of Belfort. To claim a building, players will be shrewdly sending workers to mines, the forest, and various buildings and guilds of Belfort to recruit more workers and earn the ever-important buck to finance these buildings.

Setup is kind of a beast, so I won’t detail everything here. Similarly, I will not be detailing every rule in the book, as there are just too many. But, I will give a general flow of the game so readers may be able to decide if this is a game they must add to their collections.

Once the game is setup and player order is established, each player will complete their entire turn in player order. Players will have many choices available to them on their turn: place workers on various buildings they had previously built, place workers on guild tiles to access powerful abilities, recruit more workers, hire gnomes to unlock certain portions of buildings, gaining more building plans, visiting the trading post to exchange resources, transform normal workers into master workers, and lastly assign workers to gather resources (wood, stone, metal, and gold) in the forests and mines surrounding Belfort.

At certain times during the game players will score their efforts to move up (and down) the VP track. It is at the end of the third and final scoring that the game ends and a victor is crowned.

While this is a very broad and general description of the rules of Belfort, each option listed contains layers of strategic depth that, like all good worker placement games, limits the players’ abilities to go everywhere they like as workers are in limited supply. For those gamers who have never played a worker placement game, this is both excruciating and delicious.

Components. This game boasts way too many components for the box in which is barely contained. I say this with one complete expansion and the promo set of guild tiles included, and the latest expansion on the way. All of the components in this game are stellar. The cards are great. All the cardboard play mats and tiles are great. The worker components and all the wooden bits are super great, AND I didn’t even mind having to sticker my own workers. The best part about the components in Belfort is definitely the art. The team designed an excellent art style for this one, and seeing little hidden jokes within the art makes it all that more interesting to me.

So DOES it hold up after all these years? I think it does. Though I would not consider Belfort an “easy” game to learn, teach, or play at first, after a few rounds players generally catch on and begin to really weigh all their options. This is a great game for think-hungry gamers. This game is conversely a bane for all AP-prone players. I fall right in the middle, but lean towards faster play at the expense of my final score. But that’s the beauty of Belfort and of all worker placement games: there are so many choices that one could easily just try to play so that they visit every location at least once. Now, by doing this the players are also ignoring the true goal of the game: area majority within the districts of Belfort, but if a player isn’t as aggressive or victory-crazed, that’s not a bad thing.

For me, I love Belfort. A lot. Unfortunately for me, during this crazy COVID time, I will not be able to play it much, and was lucky to be able to pull it out recently again after not playing it for several years. But, I always look upon the box fondly and wish I could just bust it out any time I want. Maybe someday someone will create solo rules for it and I can enjoy it that way. My wife is not a fan, but also she’s not really a fan of games that are longer than an hour generally. I cherish this game, and am quite happy to have it in my collection.