I really ought to learn not to visit crowdfunding sites over coffee… Another great looking game caught my attention this morning, and I just had to dig deeper: The Great Library, designed by Vital Lacerda, responsible for killer games such as On Mars and Speakeasy, is a similarly heavyweight, wonderfully-themed, complex euro game. The artwork is absolutely gorgeous too, as we’ve come to expect from Ian O’Toole.
The rulebook opens with: ‘In the third century B.C., Ptolemy I envisioned the creation of the Great Library of Alexandria, a monumental repository of human knowledge […]. Constructed by the Ptolemaic dynasty, this institution became a hub for students, scribes, Scholars and Librarians, and great minds from diverse cultures. Ptolemy's dream was to amass the world's knowledge, and the library housed countless manuscripts, reflecting his Herculean effort to collect and preserve the intellectual heritage of the ancient world.’ Your task, as a librarian, in this competitive 1–4 player game is to fill the library with all the manuscripts and artefacts the king desires.
Playing the Game
I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail on The Great Library’s gameplay: the current version of the rulebook (available via the campaign page) is a dense 24 pages, not to mention another 12 for the solo mode, and condensing that coherently is beyond my abilities! Instead, I’ll give an outline of the interdependent goals of the game and the actions available on each turn.
The game is played over a number of ‘generations,’ which consist of a planning phase, execution phase and end phase (the final of which is clearing up and returning your workers, known as ‘scholars,’ to base, and I’ll say no more about it). In the planning phase, you place a scholar on the generation track—there are 7 available ‘generation discs,’ corresponding to locations on the large and busy main board where actions take place, and when the actions on a disc have been taken, that disc moves along the track—reaching the end of the track is one trigger for game end.
The execution phase consists of a number of turns during which players can take a couple of actions; when all players pass (see later), the generation ends. The majority of the actions involve gaining or transforming resources, or moving items between main board and player board. Another example is fulfilling a ‘king’s request’—like contract cards in other games—in which you match the requirements and place a manuscript, great work or craft item in the main library; filling the library is another way to trigger the end of the game. Extra points can be gained by matching item type and layout patterns indicated on head librarian cards or pinax tiles. Other actions gain more members for your team: invited scholars adding to your workers, or scribes to perform translations, and ships to transport material from foreign lands—and you also have the ability to upgrade all these operators as well.
A primary resource in the game is time! Time is consumed when performing any action—though there are a few opportunities to pay in other ways—and you gain time as a result of, among other things, where you choose to place your scholar on the generation track. One particularly interesting and clever use of time is when players pass; or to be more exact, choose to take the ‘read’ action. Once a player has done that, they can perform no other actions during that generation (similar to passing in Terraforming Mars), while others continue to play; however, on every subsequent turn until everyone passes, the other players must pay a unit of time to players who are reading.
As mentioned earlier, there are 7 action locations on the board:
- School, where recruit scribes with various specialities and upgrade them via training;
- Scriptorium, in which your scribes translate manuscripts matching their skills, with the assistance of ‘translation stones;’
- Academy, where ‘research’ happens, which can result in, among other things, gaining a ‘great work’ to be added to the library;
- Palace, where you gain further king’s requests;
- Garden, the place where visiting scholars seem to want to hang out, and from where you can recruit them to provide additional workers;
- Harbo[u]r—grow your fleet of ships; and
- Navigation (personally, I feel this is a poor choice for the name—World or Sea might fit better with the other names), the area where you manage your ships, gathering resources, untranslated manuscripts and those ever-useful translation stones.
There’s a heck of a lot going on in this game, and it’s all wonderfully interconnected—perhaps overwhelmingly so. The Great Library is the sort of game that will take several long plays to get familiar with, and then you’ll want to experiment with numerous strategies to get the best out of it. I especially like the need to juggle precious time, and the tension between spending lots of time to get that one action you really need vs visiting other locations in order to compensate for missing out on the one you really wanted. The sheer size of the experience equates to high replayability, because although randomness plays a fairly small part in the game, there’re just so many routes to success that you’ll keep coming back to it.
The solo mode employs an automa librarian called Zotikós, which uses its own player board (I mean ‘workshop’) and several decks of cards, and one nice feature is that Zotikós can be tuned to operate at 4 different difficulty levels. It’s also not just a beat-your-high-score game, but you do have to beat Zotikós as well.
Campaign Summary
At time of writing, the game’s late pledge manager is open on Gamefound, but a little more information about The Great Library appears on the earlier Kickstarter campaign page, such as a link to a Tabletopia version to try.
Upgraded components (some metal tokens and rather tasteful wooden tiles) are offered as part of the crowdfunding campaign, but among the rewards, Eagle-Gryphon Games is offering early delivery of the game for people who are truly eager: the target date for normal delivery is September 2026, but should you be impatient, you can pay almost double to receive it in August—something for games reviewers with significant ad revenues, perhaps. I note, though, that the page says nothing about when in September or August the games will be shipped.
The campaign’s add-ons are going to be a boon to people who’ve missed out on other Eagle-Gryphon Games products, which are hard to find via retail channels (if they ever reached retail at all): what looks like a huge back catalogue is available here, both base games and expansions—including On Mars, Speakeasy, and many others.
Having said that, the campaign does seem to have garnered a lot of negative feedback in the comments section, but not about the games; instead, people are protesting at huge costs for updates specifically correcting errors in the first printings of some games. That does indeed seem to be mistreating earlier backers, and those updates really ought to be available via channels other than crowdfunding. I hope that Eagle-Gryphon Games will do something about it—if only to set a precedent should similar updates for The Great Library be necessary.
Wrap Up
If you like heavyweight, complex games, The Great Library is one to keep an eye on, even more so if you’re a fan of Lacerda’s earlier works. As always, if you’re keen on this project, remember that crowdfunding comes with risks, even for a company which has had as many successful campaigns as Eagle-Gryphon Games, do do your research before parting with your money—and do remember to take shipping and VAT into account when working out costs.
Finally, my favourite post in the campaign’s comment section is: ‘Please hide an orangutan somewhere in the library’—no word if that happened, but I 100% agree. (If that makes no sense, I surmise you have no Terry Pratchett on your bookshelf.)
About the Author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
