Wondering About Olympia

If you haven't played 7 Wonders, it's a fantastic drafting game where you build a city around one of the "seven wonders of the world". Each game uses mostly the same card pool, so after a while you'll know what to expect, but what really makes things interesting is the Wonder Boards, a starting card for each player that helps you set your strategy up a little bit and gives you some direction. (I enjoy 7 Wonders with the Leaders expansion, which adds a pre-draft draft of Leader cards that give you even more strategic direction and customization, but that's not available on Board Game Arena, where I play all of my 7 Wonders these days.

I think all of the Wonder Boards are pretty decent these days... except Olympia. A couple of years ago, 7 Wonders got a revised printing that added and modified cards and, notably, changed up the functionality of the Olympia wonder board, and in my opinion, it was significantly for the worse.

Screenshot taken from one of my replays on Board Game Arena.

Each Wonder Board has two sides, with the B-side generally being more complex. In most games of 7 Wonders, you’ll be allowed to choose your wonder side, though I have a very frustrating memory of a 7 Wonders tournament at PAX East where wonder sides were assigned at random to my great detriment. Most of the Wonders have some solid direction - the Colossus at Rhodes gives you more combat potential, the Hanging Gardens at Babylon give you scientific flexibility, and so on. Olympia, however, is fairly lacking in direction and, in my opinion, quite lacking in power as compared to its counterparts.

The A-side has the same first and third stages as other A-side wonders (three and seven points each for a nominal cost) with the second stage allowing you to play your first card of each color for free after building that wonder stage. Wide-ranging diversification isn’t usually a great strategy unless the Leaders expansion is involved, and many of your free builds will end up as small discounts.

The B-side basically prices you into building the first stage on the last turn of Age 1, as it allows you to play the first card of each age for free. This gives you some flexibility regarding resources, as you might get to play a powerful Caravensery in Age 2 without access to two wood or a score-boosting Guild in Age 3 while lacking some of the advanced resources. That said, the unpredictability is the downfall here. The second stage lets you play the last card of each age for free, which is often a card you’re not particularly excited about and can even sometimes go to waste as you end up building a wonder stage with that card. The third, a five-point increase for the hefty cost of one of each advanced resource, is below the curve in a way that indicates that someone in development thought Olympia needed a downside.

I don’t know why the folks who worked on 7 Wonders, an otherwise fairly well-balanced game, decided to send Olympia directly into the shadow realm when they redesigned it for the new version. What I do know is that, if Olympia’s stronger than I think it is, I hope someone tells me before I get it assigned to me in my next online board game session. Twice in a row. Again.