Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 30-90 minutes

The Components

Toledo comes in a square box with a fun variety of components. These include:

The Board: Depicting a route through the city of Toledo, climbing up from a cathedral to the Alcazar (that's a Spanish castle, from the Arabic, al qasr). There are spaces all along the route for businesses.

On the downside, the board is a little busy thanks to its background. On the upside, it's got places for almost all the pieces, which makes setup easy.

The Cardboard Bits: There are a slew of cardboard bits, all printed on medium-weight cardboard with a linen-textured finish. Each player gets 8 buildings in his player color, each of which has spaces for one or two pawns and which has clear icons showing what it does. There are also 19 sword tiles--each of which depict cost and value. 16 skill tiles each show either a fencing or movement skill. Finally there are 23 steel counters, which are pretty much gray cardboard rectangles.

The art is fair to good and thanks to good attention paid to utility, all the tiles are quite easy to use.

Gems: These are the other component required to make swords (along with steel). Each is an irregular plastic gem. They're overall quite attractive.

Cards: A set of 90 cards printed on medium-to-heavy cardstock with a gloss finish. The 84 movement cards each depict a value as well as a fencing move (used only for combat). They have attractive art on them.The 6 El Greco paintings each feature a Victory Point value and beautiful artwork.

Pawns: 20 wooden pawns, 5 per player. They look sort of like men in wide-brimmed hats, and are relatively evocative.

Overall, the components are of good quality, while their beauty runs from fair (the skill tiles) to good (the tiles and movement cards) to great (the gems and the paintings). Add that on to generally easy to use pieces, and the package overall earns a "4" out of "5" for Style: good.

The Gameplay

The object of Toledo to earn the most points, mainly from forging and delivering swords.

Setup: The board is laid out on the table. It has three printed businesses on it: two taverns and an artist. Skill tiles and sword tiles are placed on the board, sorted by type. Paintings are placed on the board in order of descending value (3,2,2,1,1,1). Gems and steel bars are also placed on the board in the appropriate locations. Each player takes his 5 pawns and places them in the cathedral.

Each player is dealt an initial hand of 5 movement cards and given his 8 businesses.

Order of Play: On his turn a player may take one of four actions: draw cards; place building; move forward; or move back.

Draw Cards: A player takes two new movement cards.

Place Business: Each player has 8 businesses, two each of steel merchant, gem merchant, swordsmith, and fencing master. One of each pair of buildings has space for one pawn and the other has two.

When taking this action a player takes one of his unused buildings and puts it on a blank building space on the board.

Move Forward: This is the heart of the game. A player plays a movement cards and moves one of his pawns forward along the game track by exactly that many spaces. He must land on a building--either one of the three printed on the board, or else one played by a player.

The pawn may optionally trade at the business. Then the player may move the same pawn or a different pawn by playing another movement card of the same value as the first. This can continue as long as the player has cards of that value that he wants to play.

However, to trade at a business or to end movement at a business, there must be a space for the pawn. If not, the pawn must duel someone sitting there already.

Dueling. Duels are fought in the best 2 out of 3 matches between a pair of pawns. Each round, a card is drawn from the movement deck, and the dueling icon on it is consulted. It may show a dueling skill and will show either a victorious attacker or defender. If exactly one of the players participating in the duel has the depicted skill, that player wins the round of dueling. Else, the attacker or defender wins, as shown.

Whoever loses two out of three rounds in a duel has their pawn sent back to the cathedral.

Trading. Each business has an action you can take. If it's your own business you can use it for free when you arrive at the business (possibly after dueling someone for space). If it's someone else's business you must pay them by giving them a movement card of at least value 1 if it's in the first row of the path, at least value 3 if it's in the second row, and at least value 5 if it's in the third row.

The buildings do the following things:

• Tavern. Draw 3 movement cards.
• Artist. Take 1 painting.
• Steel Merchant. Take 1 steel bar.
• Gem Merchant. Take 1 gem.
• Swordsmith. Create 1 sword. You can make a plain sword with 1-4 bars of steel for Victory Point value 2-7 or you can make a fancy sword with 1-4 bars and gems for value 4-15.
• Fencing Master. Take 1 skill. There are 3 dueling skills and 1 movement skill (which lets you play 1 card of a different value when moving, but costs you 2 VPs at the end of the game). You can only have 3 skills; if you take a fourth, you must discard one.

The Alcazar. You have to move into the Alcazar with an exact value, though there are 2 spaces to make this easier. When a pawn gets to the Alcazar you get to deliver 1 sword to the Emperor and you also bring the game closer to ending.

Move Backward: You can spend your actions for a turn to move one pawn all the way back to the cathedral (perhaps because you need to visit businesses near the start).

Ending the Game: The game ends after a player moves a third pawn into the Alcazar. At that point each player gets the value for any delivered swords, half the value for undelivered swords, the value of any paintings, and one VP for every two gems. The player with the most VPs wins.

Relationships to Other Games

I've heard some people refer to Toledo as Martin Wallace's Caylus ... and it's really not. There are certainly ideas in common, like the concept of placing buildings on a road that other people will use, but beyond that Toledo is an entirely different game.

If anything, I'd call Toledo Martin Wallace's version of Backgammon. You similarly have a group of pieces that you're trying to move to the end of a track by using a randomizer (here, cards rather than dice). You can also "hit" other players' pieces to knock them back to the start. Certainly, there's a lot more depth to Toledo than Backgammon, but it still feels like they share a common ancestry.

Oddly, I've reviewed one other Mayfair Game that I thought was Backgammon-like; that was Tuchulcha, which they published about four years ago in association with da Vinci Games.

Toledo is much lighter than the games that Wallace publishes through Warfrog, his own company. Nonetheless, it has a few features that you can recognize as Wallace standards, including a sort of economic system and an ability to rush the game to conclusion if you think you're winning.

The Game Design

Toledo is a light game but it nonetheless has interesting choices.

You're overall trying to manage the strategy of resource-management: when do you use up your cards, and when do you wait and gather more? When do you make swords and are other players liable to grab those limited cardboard pieces first? Similarly you have to decide when and how to place your businesses. Here you're not only thinking about potential payments you could get from other players, but also how you might use a string of businesses to quickly push toward the Alcazar without paying costs for your trading.

The lightness comes from the fact that the decisions aren't that deep. There are limited possibilities for how you can place your businesses and how you can use your cards, but the depth of play is nonetheless sufficient for the expected game length.

I will, however, offer a caveat on game length. I've seen complaints about games lasting just 20-30 minutes. I generally find that possibility unlikely among good players, because you have to have a sufficient lead before you make a rush for the end--but through poor gameplay a game could be over quite quickly. This is a vulnerability that I don't like in games, but it didn't come up in either of our playtests. One of our players tried to make a rush in our second game, but then another player got too close to him (scorewise), and he was forced to back off until he could reestablish a better lead.

Overall, Toledo is enjoyable. I think it'll do best among families and other casual gamers, but for a filler it's not bad (if a bit long on average). To that degree I've given it a high "3" out of "5": it's a slightly above-average game. However, I think casual players may like it even more, as it does a pretty good job of offering depth despite its simplicity.

Conclusion

Toledo is a light game by Martin Wallace that balances some strategic play and some risk-taking. It's a little long for a filler but will probably appeal to families and more casual players looking for something with a bit more depth than the average family game.