Designed by Trey Chambers.

You are a teacher of a mystical arts school that is definitely NOT Hogwarts, and the Chancellor who is definitely NOT Dumbledore has just passed away. Now, you and the other teachers will jockey for position to take over this thankless administrative bullshit job that mostly consists of dealing with PTA meetings and very concerned parents who are upset that their son Bobby isn’t yet turning his sister into a newt at a third grade level.

Argent: the Consortium is a worker placement game – on crack. You will place your workers – er, students- in various locations around the campus, where they will generate various resources, which allow you to collect artifacts, earn more powerful spells, and politic key council members, among many other things. The exact rooms in the campus are randomly chosen, and doublesided, meaning the game has a near infinite amount of replayability.

Interesting Mechanic: Meeples with Powers. You place five students per turn, but the interesting thing is that each student has different powers. Red students can send another to the infirmary and take their place, whereas green ones are immune to those attacks. Purple students allow you to take two actions and blue ones are immune to magic cast by your opponents – so on and so forth. These meeple powers transform the normal passive-aggressive nature of most worker placement games into a knife fight.

Argent: the Consortium is a chaotic, big, sprawling mess of a game. It takes an astonishing amount of table space to play a four player game, and the aggressive nature of the game can make it hard to form a chaotic strategy. Still, if you like worker placement games, this is a big, ambitious one, and a very fresh take for one as well.

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(Photo Credit: Jesta the Rogue)