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Svarog's Den - Board Games

SPIEL ’22 Preview: Finish Mozart’s Requiem in Lacrimosa

by Candice Harris

Gen Con 2022 was filled with teasers for me. I was equally, if not more, excited to get sneak peeks of SPIEL ‘22 releases as I was to check out new Gen Con releases. I especially couldn’t wait to get to Devir’s booth to get a glimpse of Lacrimosa, a Mozart-themed game that I heard just enough about to know that I wanted to play it. Devir had a single copy of Lacrimosa in shrink at their booth, so a glimpse was exactly what I got, until they were able to send me a review copy so I could actually play it and see if it resonates with me.

Lacrimosa is SPIEL ’22 release from designers Ferran Renalias and Gerard Ascensi, where 1-4 players take on the roles of Mozart’s most generous patrons after his death to help his widow, Constanze, employ the right composers to complete Mozart’s unfinished Requiem in D Minor. Over the course of the game, players tell their stories of travels with Mozart across Europe and the works they funded, while financially supporting the musicians to complete the Requiem, all to appear most impressive to Constanze, in hopes to be mentioned in her memoirs as Mozart’s most significant patron.

A game of Lacrimosa is played over five rounds, each of them corresponding to a different creative stage in Mozart’s life. Each round begins with a Main phase where you take actions, followed by a Maintenance phase where you clean up and prepare for the next round. At the end of the fifth round and endgame scoring, whoever has the most victory points is the winner of the game.

Each player starts the game with a deck of 9 Memory (action) cards and an Opus card in their tableau. At the start of each round, all players simultaneously draw Memory cards from their own deck until they have 4 cards in their hand. Then starting with the first player in turn order, each player takes a turn playing 2 cards from their hand into their personal player board. One card is placed in the Experiences section at the top of the board, and the other is placed in the Story section at the bottom of the board. The dual-layer player boards and Memory cards are well-designed, so when you slide a card into a top or bottom card slot, you only see details relevant to where it’s positioned. After 2 cards have been played in the respective areas of your player board, you perform the action on the card you placed in the top slot, then draw new cards based on the number showing on the leftmost empty slot of your personal board.

Player board

In Lacrimosa, there are five different actions available and each has its own associated icon. I’ll describe each action as it relates to the main game board from the top down. At the top of the game board there is a card market with two different types of cards: Opus and Memory cards. You can acquire a new Memory card to modify your deck by performing the Document Memories action. When you take this action, you choose a Memory card that’s in the card market and pay its cost in ducats (money) and story points (resources) based on the space it occupies in the card market. Then you remove the card you just played in the Story (bottom) section of your player board, and replace it with your newly acquired Memory card.

Double-action Memory cardsThe Memory cards in the card market get juicier as the game progresses. There are some with two action icons which will allow you to take two actions on a single turn, some with rewards you gain when you play them as an action card, and they all usually have better story point income on the bottom portion of the card if you choose not to use it for its action(s). Remember, you’ll only ever have a 9-card Memory deck, so as you Document Memories, you are always replacing an existing card with a new card. After you swap in your new Memory card, you refill the card market by sliding all cards to the right and drawing new cards from the main deck.

The Commission an Opus action is similar, but slightly different. When you Commission an Opus, the cost of the card is on the card itself, but depending on the space it occupies in the card market, you may have to pay an additional cost. Or, if you’re lucky enough to snag an Opus in the rightmost slot of the card market, you gain a bonus story point resource, which can be used to help pay the cost of the Opus card. Either way, after you pay the Opus card’s cost, you gain an amount of victory points (VP) as indicated on the card. Then you place your new Opus card in your tableau above your player board and refill the card market. Similar to the Memory cards, the Opus cards get juicer from round to round, making them progressively harder to ignore.

The next action, Perform or Sell Music, is the only action that is independent from the game board as it only impacts your personal tableau of Opus cards. When you Perform or Sell Music, you are performing or selling one of the Opus cards in your tableau. Each Opus card has a cost and reward for performing it, as well as a cost and an even more powerful reward for selling it.

When you perform an Opus, you rotate it 90 degrees, after paying the cost and gaining the reward, to indicate it has been performed this round. Each Opus card can only be performed once per round and resets at the end of the round during the Maintenance phase. Alternatively, you can sell an Opus card which removes it from the game, but gives you a much stronger reward.

I was all about the Symphony Opus cards…

Each Opus card also has a type (Opera, Religious Music, Symphony, and Chamber Music), and there are mid-game and end-of-game benefits to collecting the same type of Opus card. Thus, deciding the right moment to perform versus sell your Opus cards is one of the decisions you’ll be wrestling with throughout the game. You’ll also want to watch your opponents and make sure they’re not going overboard with one type of Opus card so you can prevent them from taking advantage of the various set collection benefits.

The map

Jumping back to the game board, in the center, there’s a map of Central Europe which relates to the Travel action. When you perform the Travel action, you decide which city or royal court you’d like to move the Mozart’s Journeys marker to. The paths connecting the various spaces each have a ducat value. You can move the Mozart’s Journeys marker to any space you’d like, but you have to pay ducats based on the route you choose. Once the Mozart’s Journeys marker has reached the destination, you must also pay the cost in Journey story points that is shown on the destination tile, then remove the tile from the board.

Royal Court tile exampleIf you take a city tile, you discard the tile to the side of the board after you gain its reward. The rewards could be resources, money, victory points, actions, and more. For example, there’s a city tile that grants you 3 VP for each religious music Opus card you have. This is one of the Opus card set collection benefits I mentioned above. Alternatively, if you take a royal court tile, you gain an immediate reward, then you take the tile which has an endgame scoring objective based either on Opus works you’ve funded (Opus cards in your tableau) or for your participation in completing the Requiem, which brings me to the fifth and final action in Lacrimosa.

At the bottom of the game board, you’ll find staff paper for five different movements in the unfinished Requiem score. When you take the Requiem action, first you choose an empty instrument space in a movement of the Requiem that you wish to commission. Then you remove the matching Requiem marker from your player board, receive the corresponding reward, and place the marker on the empty instrument space with the side matching the composer you wish to hire facing up. As you would imagine, the composers don’t work for free. You also need to compensate them by paying the cost on the top corresponding composer tile in the movement where you placed your Requiem marker.

An almost finished Requiem towards the end one of my 4-player games

During setup you randomly choose two of four different composers to include in the game. For each movement, each composer has a set of composer tiles which are stacked in ascending cost order such that the cheaper ones are on top, and they get more expensive as players acquire them. Each composer has a varying number of tiles for each movement. For example, for one movement, a composer may have three tiles stacked, whereas the other may have five.

After you pay the corresponding composer tile costs, you collect the reward on the tile and place it face down on your player board where you removed the Requiem marker you just placed. The rewards may be one-time, immediate benefits, or in some cases, ongoing special abilities. There are composer tiles that allow you to perform a particular action a second time, some that give you an extra story point during the Maintenance phase, and others that give you victory points whenever you gain, perform, or sell certain types of Opus cards.

At the end of the game, there’s an area majority scoring for each movement based on which composer made the greatest contribution. Each movement has two VP values, a higher value and a lower value. To score it, determine which composer contributed the most to that particular movement, then all players with matching Requiem markers score the higher VP value for each of their Requiem markers matching that composer. Any Requiem markers matching the other composer are worth the lower VP value. If both composers are tied, then all Requiem markers are worth the lower VP value.

Stadler was all over this Requiem

When you’re taking the Requiem action, there can be a lot to think about, especially later in the game. You need to decide which movement, which instrument, and which composer makes most sense for you to contribute to at that moment. There are times where the instrument you choose is based on the reward you get, which can help pay the composer tile cost, or set you up for something on your next turn. You might also want to pick a particular instrument to block out your opponents if there’s only remaining space for that particular instrument. Then when deciding on a composer and a movement, you’ll often need to decide if you want to help the rich get richer and get in on some of that richness, or go against the grain and pick the underdog to stir up some composer competition in a particular movement. There’s also a race to get the composer tiles before they get super expensive or run out. I really like all the competition that stems from the Requiem action and how the pressure you feel is player driven.

Players continue taking turns playing 2 cards from their hand into their player board and taking actions until all players have played 8 of their 9 cards, completing 4 turns. The 9th card is held over as part of your starting hand for the next round. Then there’s a Maintenance phase for income and cleanup to prepare for the next round.

During the Maintenance phase, the first thing you do is return your story point tracks on your player board to zero, then you update them according to the cards you played into the Story (bottom) section of your player board. This is something you’ll be thinking about when deciding which 2 cards to play each turn. You have to consider the actions you want to take along with what resources you want to start with next round. It makes for some interesting hand management decisions that make you think, but also give you plenty of flexibility. You may also have composer tiles that give you additional advancements on your story point tracks as well.

Next, depending on the position of your purse marker on the Finance Track, you may receive money, story point track advancements, and victory points. Throughout the game, you’ll be working to get your Finance Track purse marker as high as possible, but there are times you’ll need to also drop it down as part of the hiring costs for getting the composer’s to contribute to the Requiem. It’s a constant struggle. Every bit of income is important since money can be so tight in Lacrimosa.

Period II bonus tileEach round, there’s also a bonus tile which sits on the game board and rewards you for action icons that appear on cards in the Experiences (top) section of your player board. This is nice because it’s positive and it’s something to nudge you in a direction each round, but if you choose not to play the corresponding action, there’s no penalty. After everyone gains rewards for the bonus tile, you take the 8 cards in your player board out, and shuffle them to form your new Memory card deck.

To clean up the game board, you flip over any city and royal court tiles on the map which aren’t on the side with the gilded frame. Then you fill any empty slots from the appropriate deck, with the gilded frame face down. In this way, new tiles show their starting side with weaker rewards, and all existing tiles are on the gilded frame side with more enticing rewards. Then you clean up the card market by removing some cards, and changing to the next round’s deck to refill the market.

Once you’ve completed the fifth round of the game, after getting your player board income in the Maintenance phase, perform endgame scoring by tallying up victory points for any royal court tiles you fulfilled, then you score points for each movement of the Requiem, and for your remaining story points and ducats. Whoever has the most victory points wins the game.

Lacrimosa plays well at all player counts, noting I only got a small taste of the solitaire module. The main deck of Memory/Opus cards is adjusted based on player count, as well as the number of composer tiles, and the amount of instrument spaces that are blocked randomly during setup with Constanze counters.

In the solo mode, you set up a 2-player game with a few modifications. The Soloist bot you compete against has its own deck of cards and three difficulty levels. Your turns are performed the same as they are in a multiplayer game. When it’s the Soloist’s turn, you draw the top card off the Soloist deck and place it in the Experiences section of the bot’s player board, then draw a second card to place in the Story section. The top of the card indicates an action the bot will perform, while the bottom of the card is divided into three columns to indicate how the action should be performed.

The leftmost column indicates which of the available Opus or Memory cards the Soloist will take when performing the Document Memories, Commission an Opus, or Perform or Sell Music actions. The middle column indicates which direction Mozart’s Journeys marker will move and the number of royal court tiles to visit with the Travel action. The rightmost column indicates which movement and the instrumentation priorities when performing the Requiem action.

Soloist cards in action

The Soloist earns points and adds player interaction throughout the game from performing revised versions of each action. At the end of the game, the Soloist also scores points for royal court tiles, and the Requiem is scored as normal. I found the Soloist bot to be fairly easy-to-learn and smooth-to-run. Plus, I love that the Soloist scores throughout the game similar to human players. You really feel the competition and an underlying tension since the Soloist bot is scoring points often and snatching up precious tiles and cards that you’ll often want.

I really dig Lacrimosa; everything from the theme, to the gameplay, to the components, feels smooth and well-crafted. I found the art to be lovely and very fitting as well, so kudos to Jared Blando and Enrique Corominas for their contributions. Plus, it’s great that you can play Lacrimosa with four players in less than two hours, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

I didn’t delve too deep into the resources, but besides ducats (money), you have three different types of story points: Mozart’s Talent (black), Journey (red), and Composition (white). Each type of story point fits logically and thematically with the actions in the game. It’s also interesting that you have story point tracks on your player board which reset each round based on the cards you play into the Story section of your player board, but there are also plenty of opportunities to gain wooden disc story points. When spending story points, you can spend your discs or tracks, but the beauty of the discs is that you can can also exchange a story point disc for 1 ducat at any point on your turn, so they can be very valuable when money gets tight.

Besides its refreshing theme, one of the things I appreciate most about Lacrimosa is the abundance of player interaction. You’re always hoping someone doesn’t take the Opus or Memory card you have your eyes on in the card market. Or better yet, it’s exciting when your opponents buy other cards so the card you want slides down and becomes cheaper for you. Meanwhile, you’ll be itching to grab a particular city tile on the map, hoping no one beats you to it. Or even worse, your opponents may decide to perform the Travel action ahead of you and move Mozart farther away making it more expensive for you to get to the city you were hoping to move to. Plus, you can’t sleep on contributing to the Requiem. Once people start filling in instruments and claiming composer tiles, you might miss out on getting the higher scoring composition placements. Or perhaps you want to block the last timpani space and deny your opponents from placing their timpani Requiem marker at all. There’s so much player interaction, but it feels more subtle than aggressive.

If you’re looking for a medium-weight eurogame with a unique theme and player interaction, along with interesting hand management and deck construction mechanisms, be sure to check out Lacrimosa.

I picked up On the Origins of Species from the same designer duo when I attended SPIEL for the first time in 2019, and I really liked it. Unfortunately, I never got it to the table aside from a 2-player learning game, so I eventually (regretfully) sold it. After playing Lacrimosa, I definitely want to revisit On the Origins of Species and I’m also looking forward to checking out 1998 ISS, another SPIEL ’22 release from Gerard Ascensi and Ferran Renalias, published by Looping Games.

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