Bohemians is a 1-4 player deck-building game where you each play as a struggling artist in Paris. You spend your day in search of inspiration (and occasionally work on your art), juggling all of this while trying to maintain your day job that keeps the hardships of the bohemian life at bay.
A Work of Art
The first thing I want to say is that Bohemians is gorgeous. The box art is beautiful; the manual is full of art and striking colours. The rulebook, boards and most of the cards have wonderful oil painting art. Perfect for the theme, and none of it gets in the way of clarity and usability.
The only exception is the Hardship cards. These cards use striking and slightly nightmarish abstract images. It definitely helps let you know when you draw it that something has gone very, very wrong.
Before we go into the details of the game, let’s discuss the components.
Force of Habit
The most used cards in Bohemians are the Habit cards. These are the activities that happen through the day and map out your personal growth and creativity.
The core Habit cards have two main aspects. Each has a single colour and a combination of icons on the left and/or right edges.
Green – Discipline, dedication
Pink – Romance, desires
Blue – Freedom, adventure
Orange – Companionship, celebration
Eye – Focus
Heart – Playfulness
Padlock – Curiosity
Mask – Expression
The Habit cards do a remarkable job of mapping a plausible combination of those aspects in the activity. If you play the orange card “Talk With An Intriguing Stranger", then you enter this with Focus, Curiosity and Expression. You leave it with Focus, which may mean that to optimise scoring, you then play the green “Instantly Master a New Discipline” or the orange “Drown Your Sorrows”. The theme does not get in the way of balance, but it is often able to create moments.
Friends and Acquaintances
The Muses deck is a vital method to improve your deck. They are placed below a Habit of your choice and have some potentially powerful abilities. Some are as simple as bonus Inspiration, others boost the potential of the attached Habit, and others can be protection from Hardships or an aid to deck thinning.
There are some rules you have to follow. Most Muses are only available for certain parts of the day, and some only work if attached to the right colour of Habit. While the Muses have various abilities, be aware that anything more complicated than “+2 Inspiration” usually depends on the symbols on the specific Habit they are attached to, so be prepared to juggle the Muse’s restrictions and bonus to optimise scoring.
The Agony and the Ecstasy… and the Syphilis
The Hardship deck is where the game switches from fighting each other to fighting the game.
When you draw a Hardship, this is immediately put into play and will generally proceed to ruin your day. I do need to congratulate the designers on making these cards thematically coherent for
the way they affect the game. Opium Addiction means you miss some of the day, Poor Hygiene causes you to discard a Muse, Fixation gives you another Hardship if you didn’t generate enough Focus today, Financial Hardship forces you to go to work, Syphilis… well, if you draw Syphilis you search the Hardship deck for another Syphilis card and give it to someone. Say no more; well played.
Home from Home
The last main item is the Atelier.
This is a shared board where you each store your Atelier points. These points are the main method of tweaking your deck and avoiding bad days, as you toil in your workshop and focus on your art. You can use these points to draw extra cards, change the cards available to buy, ignore Hardships and thin out your deck.
Art for Art’s sake, Money for God’s sake
Gameplay is smooth and intuitive.
Draw cards until you have a total of 4 Habit cards. Muses and Hardships don’t count towards this total, so you will often draw more than this. Some Habit cards have an ability that triggers now. They generally allow you to tweak your hand of cards as you prepare for the day.
Next, take any Hardship cards drawn and place them above your Routine. These are generally the repercussions of your previous life choices coming back to bite you. Each Hardship tells you when it’s triggered and what it does.
Now comes the main part of your turn, planning your day. You can either place 3 of your Habits over the four spaces in your day and your job tile in the remaining space, or you can give in to temptation and fill all four spaces with Habits.
There is a constant dilemma when planning your day. You want to build a beautiful day of social events, camaraderie and contemplation, which creates a long sequence of icons to gain Inspiration. Placing your job drops a wall into the flow of your day though, so you will often have to decide whether you need to call in sick and take in the sights.
On the other hand, you also need to go to your job as often as you can, or you’ll gradually ruin your life. Any day you skip work means a Hardship card is dropped into your discard. It will happily wait to get shuffled into your deck and surprise you later. You’ll never be a success by playing it safe, so it’s always going to be a case of making your lazy days count.
The last part of planning is to add any Muses that you meet during your day. Place these Muses under different Habits, each will have an effect on scoring (or some other helpful bonus) which the card will describe.
Any cards left are discarded, and when everyone has finished, we take stock of our days.
Oh, what a day!
When going through your day, Bohemians adds a twist that takes this away from a simple puzzle of optimised card play to a mini work of art. Before scoring, you are asked to narrate your day.
I would suggest that you decide as a group how this is handled and if it’s done at all. It does add to the game if you make a small story of your tableau of cards, but you don’t want to make a novel of it or you’ll be here all day. Still, which is more interesting when you have a day like this:
Option 1. “I have Seek Tutelage with Florence attached, then Instantly Master A New Discipline and Talk With An Intriguing Stranger with Absinthe attached. I put the job in last. Absinthe ignores Poor Hygiene, and I’ll use Florence to reject it."
Option 2. “I met up with Florence and asked her for pointers on a new painting technique, which I quickly got the hang of. We talked and drank into the evening. Florence nearly bailed due to my odour, but she was enjoying the Absinthe and I promised to have a shower and a shave before I left for the Cabaret”
Definitely do whatever you're comfortable with, but it can be fun to be a little invested in more than the score.
Speaking of the score…
How did you do?
Now you tally up the Inspiration you’ve earned. The majority of this is by counting completed icons. Each icon in a completed crossover between edges is worth 1 Inspiration, this includes using the icons at the start and end of the day. If you play a Habit in Dawn that is a colour match to that Routine space then that’s another Inspiration. The same for the Night.
Next, check your Muses and Hardships for any changes they make to scoring.
In this example, you have scored 10 Inspiration
Now that you’ve got a final total, it’s time to go shopping.
There are three things you can spend your Inspiration on:
1. Buy new cards. There are rows of 4 new Habit cards and 4 new Muses available to buy. Muses cost 7 Inspiration, Habits have a varying cost based on how powerful they are. Any cards bought are placed in your discard, standard deck-building fare.
2. Buy an Achievement. The stack of Achievements gradually increases in cost, so the earlier you get them, the cheaper they are. Gaining 5 Achievements is how you win the game, so always consider buying one when the stars align and you manage to gain enough Inspiration to buy it.
3. Add to the Atelier. This is always worth adding to, especially if you have a few Inspiration left over from the other options.
Once this is done, finalise any Muse, Hardship or Atelier effects remaining and discard all of the cards from your Routine. Now start again with another day.
An even playing field
As with most deck-building games, everyone starts in a similar situation but will very quickly diverge in strategy as they build their deck. There are small differences that are balanced in power but give you a nudge towards certain decisions. This does a subtle but good job of preventing two players needing to fight over the exact same resources.
Players start with almost identical Habit cards. The only difference is that one specific card is a different colour. They then each get a Routine board that is used to map out their day. You can be Le Visionnaire, Le Romantique, Le Vagabond, and L'Excentrique; the differences here are the colours of the edge spaces and the types of starting and ending icons. The standard rules are that the starting cards and Routine board are random, but they suggest you may want to have each player choose them. Do this, matching the deck to the Routine board gives everyone a small early scoring boost.
What difference does this make? Your Routine will score more if you are able to play a card of a matching colour at each end of the day and/or if the edges of those cards match the edge symbols. Many cards have similarities between the arrays of left and right icons on them, so in order to have the most efficient day, you will likely want to concentrate on a subset of icons on the cards. Having each player’s Routine play better with different cards means there is an advantage to you in cards that others don’t need as much. This prevents every card from being a direct “X is better than Y” that can leave you frustrated that someone else is always taking the obviously best cards.
Final thoughts
Bohemians is a really enjoyable game, with a few caveats.
Firstly, Bohemians can get increasingly hard. In order to score enough to get the better cards and Achievements, you do need to occasionally skip work. The downside is you get a Hardship, and once you start down that path, it tends to snowball, as Hardships often cause you to gain more Hardships. You will often find that you have days where you barely get out of bed and waste your day.
Secondly, this game is longer than you would expect. The win condition is to get 5 Achievements; however, the difficulty spikes can make it rarely possible to generate enough to pick up the later Achievements. Add to this that narrating your day is fun but makes each turn take a lot longer. Consider house ruling requiring less Achievements (tweaking this by removing some lower cost Achievements).
