Century Eastern Wonders

We absolutely LOVE this game series! Definitely worth investing in-- it's not only fun to play (great strategy-style game), but these games have also proven to be super helpful in teaching how the spice trade impacted our world.

Excellent game, very fun and easy to learn. Playable many times and always fun. Simple yet entertaining mechanic and teaches strategy and planning.

Our family thoroughly enjoys this game. There are two things the manufacture could do to improve this game. 1.) Increase the font size on the instruction sheet. I would rather have two pages of instructions with 11 or 12 point font than one page with a tiny font size. 2.) My dad has poor vision, so he has trouble differentiating between colors that don't have strong contrast. The card that each player works off in both this game and Century Spice Road are too dark. If these cards had a light background color with dark markings, then they would provide the contrast my dad needs to see his game pieces as they sit on the card. Since, these cards are so dark my dad has to keep his game pieces to the side of his game card. Both of these issues are minor, but I think others would find it helpful if the manufacturer made these changes.

A bit more set up than Spice, but more flexible gameplay. The 2 of us usually play to 8 value chips instead of 4. Still under an hour. The bowls are hard to use; we just dump the blocks on the table.

Eastern Wonders is the second of a trio of Century games, each with simple mechanics that can be played on their own or in combination for a deeper experience. Spice Road was essentially "take a card or play a card," and lost its fizz after a half-dozen plays due to limited strategic options. Eastern Wonders is classic pick-up-and-deliver, and quite a bit more interesting than its predecessor. Island tiles are laid out randomly with some removed at set-up, so the map varies each time you play. These tiles function as your market for swapping goods during the game. At the "corners" of the map are 4 ports that hold score tokens. No longer can you score on your turn simply by having the required resources, you have to sail to the specific port first. When a player grabs their fourth score token, the game ends at the completion of that round. Expect 15-20 minutes per player, based on levels of analysis paralysis. An outpost must be established on an island prior to trading there, and the first player to do this builds an outpost for free. After that, you pay one good for any outposts which were there before yours. In addition, there are 4 types of markets. For each set of all 4 that contain your outposts, you choose a bonus: endgame points, extra movement, extra cargo space, resource upgrades, or bigger harvests. You also get endgame points for every outpost you build beyond the first one of each type, but the bulk of the scoring is via the port tokens. Combining with Spice Road is fun and pretty seamless. You only add the merchant cards from that game, but now they have dual uses. You can use them to acquire resources as usual, but you must also use them to move your boat anywhere on the map. The Harvest action and a couple of the outpost bonuses are not used. Combined or on its own, this game only accommodates up to 4 players instead of 5, but that's because turns take longer in Eastern Wonders, due to the greater variety of choices at your disposal.

Quick to learn, very easy to play. Lots of fun but still allows for very strategic thinking and game play.

Very well designed continuation of the Century games, which are concerned with Spice Trading. The first game - Spice Road - was a deck-building, hand management game with no board. Eastern Wonders has a modular board made up of twenty islands, and you are a spice trader travelling from island to island and then to the ports to turn your spices into contracts (victory points). You can also combine the two games into another called From Sand to Sea which uses mechanics from both games. Very fun and strategic and, occasionally, frustrating when the contract you've been building toward gets snatched from you at the last second. Recommended.

As previously said this game is a sequel, not an expansion, to Spice Road. The strategies to play are familiar. There are a second set of rules to combine the game with Spice Road into one bigger game that really makes this game worth the investment. You can’t apply your same strategy to the combined game nor each time you play. It’s really something wonderfully complex for a trading game. The island tiles could be bigger and your boat/player marker could be colored differently to stand out on the board better but those really are small quibbles.