Players: 3-6
Playing Time: 45-60 minutes
The Components
Bridge Troll comes in a small box containing:
Troll Bridges: Six square cardboard player mats, used by each player to separate his various cards and cubes. Each one has the player's unique color around the edges and show their troll in the middle. They're both useful and nicely thematic.
Cards: All the cards are medium weight and untextured. The 53 traveler cards show various passers-by (with cute art by Ryan Laukat). Most of them include two values: food value to the right and gold value to the left. Some cards also have icons showing various special powers. These cards are all easy to read and the utility on them is good--particularly when you stack up a pile of cards and can still see the food or gold values, thanks to the good layout.
There are also 15 bridge upgrade cards, which are basically victory point markers running 1-15. I was sad that they didn't show increasingly good bridges as you went up in value, but won't fault Z-Man for being conservative with their artwork order.
Finally, there are 6 rules summary cards (each showing a unique troll on the back!) and 4 travel schedules. These latter cards are pure utility, reminding you of how the game changes with different numbers of people, and well appreciated.
Cardboard Bits: A set of six square trophy tiles showing ranks and numerous circular scoring markers showing victory points are all printed on untextured cardboard. The VP markers are colored differently for the 1 VP and 5 VP values, making it easy to always grab the right ones.
Cubes: 54 wooden cubes in 6 different colors.
Die: A plastic die with six stickers placed on it to show the weather. The fact that one of my stickers was loose shows the general problem with this style of component, but I suppose it's more evocative than having a chart labeled 1-6.
Rules: A 12-page rulebook with lots of illustrations and examples. It's clear that real effort has been made to make these rules approachable, but in some places I actually found it counterproductive--primarily when rules were hidden away in examples. Despite the awkwardness of that split, the rules were OK.
Overall, Bridge Troll has good-quality components with good usability and cute artwork. However it really shines in another element of Style: theming. The whole idea of the game--that you're sitting at a bridge, throwing rocks at passersby, and then deciding whether to mug them or eat them--is hilarious. When including that in, Bridge Troll gets a high "4" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Bridge Troll is to improve your bridge by building it up with the "donations" for travelers. Of course you have to keep your strength up too. burp!
Setup: Each player takes a bridge and gets 6 boulders (cubes) in the same color as his bridge. He also starts off with 5 VPs (so he has something to lose if certain cards show up.)
Order of Play: Each round of play includes the following steps:
- Roll Weather
- Bid for Travelers
- Collect Travelers and Boulders
- Score and Upgrade
Roll Weather: The start player rolls the weather die, which shows how many traveler cards are placed out that round. It varies based on the number of players, but there could be more traveler cards than the number of players or less. The first traveler card is placed face-down, and the rest are played face-up.
The Traveler Cards. These cards, which will be won through auctions, have several aspects. There are four types of cards: regular cards, royal cards, hazard cards, and special cards. As I'll more fully describe later, whenever you get one of these cards, you choose to play them as food (e.g., to the left of your bridge) or as toll (e.g., to the right of your bridge). Here's what the four types of cards generally do:
The regular cards each have two values: a toll value and a food value. They can vary considerably. A monk, for example, is worth 1 toll or 6 food value, while a Peddler is worth 4 toll or 2 food.
The royal cards have super high toll (ransom) values, but can only be played as food.
The special cards are taken into your hand. At a later time you can use their special power, then you play them as food. The Royal Messengers allows you to move a royal card to the toll side of your bridge, the Fortune Teller lets you look at a face-down traveler card, etc.
The hazard cards are actually bad to take! The Knight takes your highest-value food card, the Bandit takes your highest-value toll card, and the Dragon takes whatever your highest-value card is. There are also some Billy Goat Gruffs which take victory points if you don't chase them away, but give you Victory Points if you do. You can avoid being affected by these various hazard cards by turning in specific numbers and/or types of boulders.
So, how do you get these cards? Through the auction …
Bid for Travelers: The core mechanic of Bridge Troll is a closed-fist auction. Each player takes 0 or more boulders (cubes) and places them in their hand. They must all be of the same color, which is obviously the case at the start of the game, but might not be later on.
Players who bid boulders will be ranked in order for the next phase depending on how many boulders they bid. The first-place player also gets a free +1 VP. Players who bid no builders mark "bridge closed". They won't be able to participate in the following traveler distribution.
Collect Travelers and Boulders: Players now take travelers in order of bids. The second you take a traveler, you must decide if you're keeping them for food or for their toll.
If there are still travelers after each player with an open bridge has collected one, then players continue taking travelers, starting again at the top of the bidding order.
Some travelers aren't good to take, but tough luck, you have to take them anyway. You can, however, throw (discard) unbid boulders to get rid of the hazards, as noted above.
Next, each player who bid boulders takes a bid from another player in reverse order of bidding. In other words, whoever bid the least will probably take the bid of the player who bid the most, etc.
Closed Bridges. Players who closed their bridges don't participate in the above collections, but they do each get to take a number of boulders from the supply (with the exact count depending on number of players in the game, and number who stayed in on the bid).
Score and Upgrade: In order from the first player, each player can now turn his cards into victory points. You choose some number of cards from your food supply and some number from your toll supply, turn them in, and earn victory points equal to the lesser of those two values.
(In other words, you try to make them equal.)
If you have sufficient victory points, you can also buy bridge upgrades, which offer a slight bonus at the end of the game.
Closed Bridges. If you closed your bridge, you have one additional option: when you turn in cards you can increase the value of your lower of tolls and food by paying 2 cubes per point.
Ending the Round: At the end of the round, the start player rotates clockwise and play continues.
Ending the Game: The game ends immediately when there aren't enough to travelers to play based on the weather. The player with the highest value of bridge cards and Victory Points wins.
Relationships to Other Game
Bridge Troll is a blind bidding game. It's a category that has any number of entrants, but the one that it reminds me most of is Fist of Dragonstones, mainly because of the shared fantasy theming.
Bridge Troll is more thematic than most of the other blind-bidding games I've played, and also has a pretty unique auction mechanism, as I'll discuss below (though I'm slightly reminded of Reiner Knizia's Money, one of the few auction games I know of where the bids circulate around).
The Game Design
When a game is as tightly focused on an auction as Bridge Troll is, it pretty much succeeds or fails based on the quality of the auction ... and here Bridge Troll does just fine, thanks to a variety of factors.
I think the most notable fact about the Bridge Troll auction is the way that it allocates both traveler cards and boulders in reverse order. First up, this gives you two different things to bid for, and you're always having to choose between them. That's a nice change from always bidding as high as an auction good warrants. Secondly, the reallocation of funds is itself a very interesting mechanism, and one that I wish was used more. I've played enough games of Reiner Knizia's Money to know it can allow for some intricate strategy as you try and play counter to the other players in order to take best advantage of what they bid.
Having the additional choice not to bid is another good tactical addition, and one that I think is pretty meaningful thanks to the ability to offset your weak point value with boulders.
There are certainly both random elements in the game (thanks primarily to the hidden card) and elements of chaos (thanks to the fact that you're at the mercy of what the other people do, and that they could suddenly push you down to a bad card--or no card at all). I think it suits the theming and weight of the game well, but buyer-beware if that's not something you tolerate.
Overall, Bridge Troll is a strong entrant to the blinding-bidding subgenre, with just enough to keep things interesting. I've given it a solid "4" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
First up, Bridge Troll is a well-designed auction game that keeps things interesting and offers some tactical depth due to a multitude of meaningful choices whenever you bid. Beyond that, it's a game that I think will particularly appeal to RPGnetters thanks to its fun, more-than-skin-deep fantasy theming.
