Gutenberg Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Gutenberg, auction and drafting game published by Portal Games. In Gutenberg, players are trying to earn the most victory points over the game's six rounds.

As Board Game Quest’s resident movie person, I’m always the first person handed cinematic tie-in games. But—for some reason—the game Guttenberg wasn’t immediately sent to my desk after it arrived at BGQ headquarters. “How could this be?” I thought. “Why wasn’t I being given a game based on the life and career of beloved 80s actor Steve Guttenberg?” I angrily contacted our benevolent publisher about this oversight (there was even an HR meeting to address the tone with which my email was sent) and a few days later I was well on my way to reviewing a game that, presumably, would involve behind the scenes high jinks on the set of the Police Academy franchise.

But to my surprise, Katarzyna Cioch and Wojciech Wisniewski’s design has nothing to do with the actor at all. It’s called Gutenberg (one less “t” in there) and is about some much less famous guy who invented a printing press in the 15th century or something. My disappointment was at an all-time high and—after sending another sternly worded email to Tony—I begrudgingly sat down to try out this one- to four-player game that takes about 90 minutes to play.

Gutenberg is a drafting-ish, auction-ish game in which players are attempting to gather the necessary equipment to fulfill various aspects of printing orders. At the beginning of the game, the board will be set up with available cards that players can acquire. On their turn, players can choose to:

At the start of each turn, players will secretly allocate their initiative marker cubes to determine which of these actions they want to take on a given turn. The