Night Soil is a very mature game about sanitation in Tudor London.
As the exemplar of cultural progress in Europe, Tudor London (1485-1603) is at the spear’s edge of cultural and technological development. However, as modern plumbing is still generations away, the city is gradually filling up with human waste, making it a terribly fragrant place to live.
In the game, players run competing night soil companies. By night, labourer cards will be used to carefully manoeuvre waste cubes through the narrow streets of London to turn a profit and to recruit workers. By day, these workers can be sent out into London to advertise, to garner favour with local businesses, or to improve their company's assets. However, crowds of workers do tend to add to the waste problem.
At the end of the game, the player who has managed to make the most money wins!
Rules & Setup
Set up isn’t too bad and we did this quite quickly between us, and as there are no actual player boards you just sort out the main ‘cloth’ board and you’re sorted and ready to go.
The rulebook for me isn’t great, and there were some issues that arose with things on cards that had no clarifications in the rulebook, and I ended the first turn without any workers to use for turn 2, and I knew this was going to happen before I finished placing workers on turn 1, and we all couldn’t work out what happened there because if you don’t place workers you are basically out of the game. We basically had to reset and start again as it again didn’t seem to tell you what happened in the event of this occurring.
Theme
Basically, the game revolves around cleaning poop up from around the streets / areas of London during Tudor times.
Some people may be put off by this theme but for me it’s just another part of England’s rich historic tapestry, and makes you realise how much we rely on modern sanitation in our lives.
Gameplay
Each round takes place over different parts of the day, namely;
Day Phase – Players place workers in Neighbourhoods to gain the printed rewards and generate cubes (poop).
Evening Phase – Bonus coins show up as rewards in full neighbourhoods. Large workers will be re-distributed around the board, possibly depositing a cub as well.
Night Phase – Players will use their Labourer cards to move cubes around the and off the board and into the River Thames to generate coins when sold, and also move cubes to block other players.
Morning Phase – Players will earn income based on the cubes they have collected, and by selling them at a ratio determined by the round number. In the final round additional bonus income is rewarded. Labourer cards used are turned back face up in this phase ready to use again next turn, and the round marker is moved down 1 space.
Each player has a set of 3 starting labourers, and you can buy more during each round for 2 coins.
For far more detailed info on what each ‘phase’ entails please refer to the rulebook on either BGG or the publisher’s website.
There are also a number of tiles you can be rewarded with for presence on the relevant tacks, and these give you added powers / benefits like winning all ties, and actions costing you one less coin.
The winner is the player with the most coins at the end of the game.
Although you all start with the same amount of workers in round 1, there are no specific player workers, and one player may only end up with one worker in a new round whilst another player might have 5.
Artwork and Components
The artwork and components are nice, with the main ‘board’ being a printed cloth, which was also a nice change from a normal cardboard game board. The cards and other tokens were of a good standard and overall the production is very well done.
The Good
Once we got the hang of things, the game played fine and we all enjoyed our first try of Night Soil.
I would definitely play again, even if it wouldn’t be my first choice if presented with other options.
The Other
The omission of rules clarifications for some card wording wasn’t helpful, and we couldn’t find anything on a web search either, and the fact it isn’t clear you need to ensure being able to get at least one worker back per turn made it frustrating to begin with, and for me this is the main rule I would change about the game, because for me having your own player colour workers would make the game fairer and ensure more chance of players getting workers back at the end of each day.
Final Thoughts
Whilst I would play Night Soil again, it’s not a game I’d rush out to buy I’m afraid, as certain parts were like a Tudor London street, and had a nasty whiff about them.
