Everyone plays the Victorian-era nephew of a super, duper wealthy uncle. An uncle so shrewd and wealthy, in fact, that he spent his whole life acquiring his fortune, but none of his life spending it. Forlorn, the uncle assigns each of his nephews some millions of dollars (a mere pittance) and states that the nephew who spends his money the fastest will get the privilege of using the rest of his fortune.
Last Will is a short (roughly 60-75 minutes), relatively easy game. There are a fair number of things going on at first glance, but I played this game with my non-gaming roommate and she picked it up pretty quickly (more so in mechanics than in strategy). At the beginning of the turn you select what your day (week? month?) is going to be like: this determines your turn order, how many cards you draw, how many errand boys you have, and how many actions you will take. You use errand boys to 'fetch' you additional (and more powerful) cards, or to do other miscellaneous tasks like manipulate the housing market. You then use your actions and cards to spend your money by buying/maintaining property, making reservations and not keeping them, or going on extravagant trips (all denoted by the cards).
The game is short, even with the maximum starting cash, the game will only take 7 turns, and it can take as few as 5 turns in my experience. This gives not a lot of leeway in terms of strategic options - once you select a path, you will benefit the most from following it with fervor. That being said, literally everything you do in the game will cost you money - so you are constantly advancing to the end goal even if you don't have the most cohesive plan. The simple question is just how efficient you are at wasting money.
The game is short, even with the maximum starting cash, the game will only take 7 turns, and it can take as few as 5 turns in my experience. This gives not a lot of leeway in terms of strategic options - once you select a path, you will benefit the most from following it with fervor. That being said, literally everything you do in the game will cost you money - so you are constantly advancing to the end goal even if you don't have the most cohesive plan. The simple question is just how efficient you are at wasting money.
FUN: 4 - Personally, I love this game. It is accessible to gamers of all types. The inherent goal is to spend money, and we can all appreciate taking a cruise with our mistress lady and faithful mutt hound. I would gladly play this game anytime. The only reason the game isn't getting a 5 is because I think the strategy of the game can get pretty redundant if you play it too often, but I've played a decent amount and still consider it to be quite fresh. I received this game as a gift but would have gladly purchased it.
STRATEGY: 3 - The only luck in this game is in the cards you draw. To be fair, not all cards are created equally in this game, so the differences can be noticeable with certain draws. Last Will is the kind of game where you CAN do anything you want, but you benefit most from creating a cohesive strategy and milking it for all its worth. Farms, for instance, are pretty weak unless you string together a collection of cards. Some strategies can be entirely based on one card: there is a real estate agent that allows you to buy and sell houses at an alarming rate (a complex strategy that is my personal favorite). I enjoy thinking about different ways to play the game, but while there are technically infinite combinations of card strategies, there are really only a few main plans that you will follow through the course of the game.
SOCIAL: 3 - The most enjoyable social aspect of this game is talking about the hilarious things you are doing to spend your money. When you select your plan for the day, you are limited in options by what your opponents chose to do before you, but you will simply choose what is best for you in the moment anyway, so interaction is limited. It almost never makes sense to take an action in this game to negatively impact another player. In terms of navigating around the other players, there are a few points where paying attention to your opponents will help your gameplay, but for the most part, you are doing your own thing. I rated the game as a 3 on social because there are almost no mechanics that encourage interaction between the players, but with that being said the game's frivolous theme lends itself to camaraderie and amusement between the players.
FLAVOR: 5 - A home run. This game oozes flavor. The comedic backdrop draws new players into the game, and when explaining the rules to new players I find myself constantly saying "all you want to do is spend as much money as possible." From School Chums who leech money away from you to extravagant Balls, everything in the game is an amusing outlet for lavish living. Spending actions to go on a boat trip makes sense to people. Having Old Friends who will go to dinner FOR YOU is hilarious in its own. Sending errand boys to the opera because you just...have nothing better to send them to do creates scenarios of "Oh good job there, Jeeves, now run along to the opera so that I may spend the weekend on the horse farm." The only thing that gives people pause in this game is the fact that they want to buy their houses as expensively as possible, the one example of "just spend your money" that makes people have to stop and think for a second.
MISCELLANEOUS: 4 - I enjoy the art on the cards in this game. The wooden pieces themselves are alright, but the artistic style is cartoonish and colorful - fitting with the lavish game flavor.
The rules were very easy to understand and explaining this game to people is a breeze. Unfortunately, the first few times you play you'll have to use the reference chart constantly on the back of the rules book to understand that the above card means that "when you buy or sell houses, you can raise or decrease the price by 2." Once you get a handle on the game's "language" it becomes quite eloquent. The replayability of this game is up in the air, for the most part I am eager to play again (and I have already played a handful of times), but on the other hand, I worry that I will exhaust all of the strategies of the game and it will come to a point where I'm just executing the actions without much thought (similar to how Dominion feels after playing it too often). That being said, I can always challenge myself to become more broke this time than the time before. Additionally, different strategies have different strengths depending on how much money you start the game with (70-130 million dollars), so there is some good variety there.
All-in-all, I think Last Will is a fantastic, lighter game with a phenomenal theme and solid game play.
Parting thoughts on strategy: As I mentioned before, making a plan and sticking to it is best. Old Friends are amazing, as you will almost always find ways to turn actions into spent money. School Chums that draw you extra cards give you a lot of flexibility later in the game. For games with lower cash amounts, I find that the "slow but steady" strategy, usually using the black bordered 'freebie' cards such as reservation works best, while manipulating the housing market is incredibly powerful if done correctly in longer games. I'm yet to make a successful farm strategy, but one thing that is clear about farms is that you need to have some sort of end game plan as selling back your farms is tough on you. For this reason you never want to own two expensive farms, but one expensive and one middling farm might work.
Cheerio, mate!
Parting thoughts on strategy: As I mentioned before, making a plan and sticking to it is best. Old Friends are amazing, as you will almost always find ways to turn actions into spent money. School Chums that draw you extra cards give you a lot of flexibility later in the game. For games with lower cash amounts, I find that the "slow but steady" strategy, usually using the black bordered 'freebie' cards such as reservation works best, while manipulating the housing market is incredibly powerful if done correctly in longer games. I'm yet to make a successful farm strategy, but one thing that is clear about farms is that you need to have some sort of end game plan as selling back your farms is tough on you. For this reason you never want to own two expensive farms, but one expensive and one middling farm might work.
Cheerio, mate!
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