Review – Guild Academies of Valeria

I just love “series” boardgames, where you have multiple games in the same setting, though they have different mechanisms and stuff.

I think I actually talked about that before.

While I haven’t played a bunch of the Valeria series of games, I have played four now, and the latest (until the next Kickstarter which I’m sure will drag me in) is Guild Academies of Valeria.

This one is where you are running a mage academy, trying to teach students the basics of magic so they can go out and complete quests and give you prestige.

Like most universities in North America, when somebody has a major success, they say “that person went to college here!”

And that’s what you’re going for.

The game was designed by Stan Kordonskiy with artwork by Mihajlo Dimitrievski. It was published by Daily Magic Games in 2023.

In Villages of Valeria, you are trying to build the new capital of the region. In Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria, you actually play as the monsters who are attacking the kingdom.

Here, you are just running the local university, trying to turn out the best students to deal with bad situations around the kingdom.

It’s still a dice-drafting game, like Shadows, but there are plenty of differences as well.

How different is it?

Let’s take a look.

It’s funny how two games can both be dice-drafting games but yet be so different.

In Guild Academies of Valeria, you not only are drafting students (dice) from the docks where they arrive (probably from some innocent villages where they decided they are going off to the big city for new adventures), but you are also building new classrooms so that you can educate your students as best you can to then send them out on quests and maybe die (ok, the dying part isn’t in the game, but I think it’s implied!).

The action selection mechanism in this game is actually really good, where you choose a dock to put your steward token on, taking a die from that dock, and then doing the action with a gold cost equal to the value of the die.

Let’s backtrack a little bit, as these dice are your students.

The dice value kind of represents (in an extremely abstract way) the level of knowledge the student has.

When you advance the student past 6, then they know everything you can teach them and they graduate.

The closer they are to 6, the more knowledge they have.

But that also makes the action where you recruit them more expensive.

It’s like getting the best students costs you more money.

Maybe my university should keep that in mind!

You can draft a slower student who doesn’t know much, which lets you take that dock’s action at a lower cost, but it will cost you more to edumacate (sic) them to the level where they will graduate.

Money? Or smart students?

You be the judge.

I love the choices this gives you, because you have to weigh how much gold you have and how much you want to spend when you draft the die and take the action.

As well, you have to determine how fast you can increase their knowledge by teaching them to make sure you get the most bang for your buck every round.

There are four different docks that give you four actions, and each one of them is a step in your educational journey.

A couple of the docks let you buy new classrooms, which will give you more options for educating your students.

Like the university where I work building a new lab to study AI, maybe?

You add the classrooms to your academy, which actually gives you even more choices during the education phase.

There are so many choices in this game!

Of course, you can’t have a university without professors.

Another dock action lets you recruit a professor to your academy (costing the value of the die you draft, of course, which actually doesn’t make a lot of thematic sense, but is still a cool game mechanism).

Some classrooms require a certain type of professor (like Villages of Valeria and I assume other Valeria games, each colour actually is based on the type of class it is, whether Holy, Workers, Soldiers, or Shadow) and these professors are experts in teaching the skills of their class.

When you recruit a professor, you also gain two knowledge bumps on students you already have.

It’s like just getting a cool new professor makes some of them smarter!

The other action you can take when drafting a new student is gaining council influence.

The action lets you pay the student’s knowledge level in gold to place a banner on a council member, or perhaps move one you’ve already placed.

You can only place a banner in one of the green council member spaces, and these will give you some benefit during the game.

Maybe they’ll make your professors and students of a certain colour wild so you can place them anywhere.

Or maybe your graduated students of a certain colour can fulfill any colour student’s space on a quest.

Or maybe it will just give you a discount when recruiting something?

The sky’s the limit!

Or, you can move one of your already-placed banners to another space, either green or you can improve it to a purple space.

The purple spaces are endgame scoring so you do want to end up there eventually.

But probably not until you’ve used the green minister’s benefit as much as you need to.

I like how this gives you a bit of mitigation with your dice, whether it’s because it gives you a discount or lets you use dice of a certain colour in many different situations.

A dice-drafting game like this needs that kind of mitigation.

Of course, you can also use magic to do affect education level, in the education phase.

And I like how you will eventually graduate these influences to endgame scoring as well.

If you don’t, you may not fare well!

Once all of your stewards have been placed (only one per dock, so you can’t take the same action multiple times), it’s time to educate.

Players simultaneously distribute their students and professors to different rooms in their academy.

There are rooms that are always available which will give you gold or maybe student advancement if you don’t have enough rooms to teach them all.

Above, the Vineyard requires an orange teacher and an orange and blue die. It gives those students 2 knowledge bumps, gives you two gold, and one victory point.

The two “always there” rooms are on your player board, requiring any teacher (doesn’t matter the colour) and any student(s), and giving you a bit of a knowledge bump, some gold or some magic.

Ideally, you’re trying to bump your students above “6” level, so that they are ready to graduate.

After all of that is done, it’s time to go questing with your graduated students.

Each quest requires a certain colour of student and maybe a wild student (depending on the level of the quest).

The two above, one requires a red student and any other student, and gives you a reward of flipping one of your other students and then two points. The orange one gives you two gold and two points.

This all adds a bit of choice to your education phase.

If a student graduates but you can’t send them on a quest, they leave for greener pastures.

Somebody else will pay them for their skills.

Thus, you have to determine just how many students you can graduate and whether or not you will have anything for them to do.

Maybe you will want to hold them back for another cycle, not teaching them enough to graduate, because you want to make sure they benefit you and not some other corporate weirdo who might hire them instead?

Then you’d better make sure they go to a school room that doesn’t educate them too much.

You can also spend magic to increase their knowledge level (magically implanting the knowledge into their brains?) if you really need them to graduate this turn.

Or you can stick them in the slow room if you really don’t want them graduating this turn.

What makes this game churn along really well, making it not as long as it might be, is that the education portion of the round is all done simultaneously.

Each player assigns students and professors to rooms, takes the rewards, and flips their dice as appropriate, all at the same time.

You had better make sure everybody knows the rules well enough to do this, though, or somebody may end up cheating without realizing it.

It does make the game flow faster, though.

The questing phase is done in player order, mainly because for each quest you complete, you move your quest marker along the track.

You may end up earning purple rooms to your tableau, so that has to be done in player order for room choice.

The purple rooms serve no educational purpose, but they add prestige to your academy.

Maybe consider it like a university building a room that has no discernible purpose but they name it after the person because they gave the university a bunch of money.

But I digress…

Quests, moving along that quest track, and getting purple buildings is where you are going to get a major portion of your points, along with purple council members.

Which is fitting that the quest track also lets you move your council banners when you pass certain points, getting ready for the end of the game.

You can also gain monuments when you put four rooms together that have a quarter-circle on the corner of the piece, forming a pedestal. These monuments will give you either help with endgame points or an immediate bonus that you can spend at any time (you don’t have to actually spend it immediately).

These can help you educate students, or give you some gold or magic, or whatever.

After four rounds, you score your prestige purple rooms as well as your purple ministers that you’ve influenced, and that determines the winner (plus the points you’ve gained during the game).

I do end up comparing this to Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria sometimes just because they are both dice-drafting games, but they are pretty different.

While there can be a bit of a runaway leader problem in Guild Academies, it’s not nearly so pronounced as in the other game.

In this one, you could spend a round building up for a big round next time, so you are kind of behind in points temporarily

But come next round?

Watch out!

And if you’re not building up, then yeah, you’re going to fall behind.

You do need to make sure you are completing a certain number of quests each game, even if it’s not uniform each round. You could complete one quest one round and then three quests the next round. Or two and two.

But if you haven’t completed four (for example), you are kind of screwed.

Unlike in some games, there aren’t a lot of different paths to victory here.

Except that even along the same path, how you move along it actually might be different, depending on your purple rooms and purple ministers.

Each purple room gives you points for certain types of rooms, or maybe for certain layouts of your rooms on your board.

The Energizing Cafe above gives you one point for each room with a Worker or Holy symbol on it. The Aquila’s Depository gives you one point for each Holy and Shadow room icon.

This will help guide you on the types of rooms you want (or the layout, if that’s what is wanted by the room/minister).

So while you do have to build rooms and fulfill quests to win, what types of rooms you build are determined by what endgame scoring choices you make.

That’s how the different scoring avenues work.

That may not be different enough for some people, who are more familiar with vastly different avenues of winning a game. Maybe multiple tracks that they move up, and concentrating on one track while getting some points on the other tracks is the way to go.

But I didn’t mind this difference. While you are kind of doing the same things in Guild Academies of Valeria, the different choices that are out there still feel varied enough that I didn’t find the game getting stale.

You may find yourself wondering how the heck anybody’s going to get near the top of the scoring track after the first round, in which you may get 5-10 points maximum.

I know I did.

But the rounds will escalate as you move along and our scores were in the 70-90 range.

The main reason I don’t quite like this game as much as Shadows, and why I would downrate it a little bit, is that it’s just really fiddly with a lot of little stuff going on and moving parts that you have to make sure you are aware of and don’t lose track.

Gaining magic, gold, moving your points, drafting your dice and moving them into right spaces, the simultaneous education phase where one person could really screw up and affect the game, all of it makes for a game that’s not quite as enjoyable as its predecessor.

But it’s still damned fun and I do enjoy it.

The choices with drafting your dice, paying less but having less educated students admitted to your academy, or drafting the cream of the crop but having to pay a premium for them, makes the action phase really interesting.

Sometimes you have to balance things on a razor wire!

Of course, if you don’t have gold, you can also just draft a die to get money and not actually do the action.

That doesn’t feel that fulfilling, but sometimes you need to do it.

I do also enjoy the decision-making as far as which council ministers you want to influence.

Do you want a discount? Or more freedom in using certain coloured dice?

And what endgame scoring condition do you want for your ministers?

You should make sure you have enough banner movement to get all three banners into purple!

I neglected that once, to my detriment.

Overall, Guild Academies of Valeria is a game that I’m always willing to play.

While it may never end up on my Top 50 games of all time, it’s an enjoyable experience and I look forward to exploring it a bit more.

Now, why don’t you just “like” this post, comment, and move on because I have an irate student at my door that I have to lightning bolt talk to.

It won’t be pretty.

(This review was written after 3 plays)