SNAP Review – Medieval Academy – Choices in Chivalry

Andrew, I bet when you were a little boy, you dreamed of being a knight.

Of course I did. Knights are so cool! They have armor, and swords, and horses and stuff.

But there’s so much responsibility! You get to save the damsel, sure, but you really do need to fight. And joust. And serve the poor, and do your studies. And you’d have to balance all of that out.

That kind of is a lot, actually. And there’s only so much time in the day. Thankfully, there’s a board game about balancing all of the responsibilities of being a knight.

There is!

This is a SNAP Review for Medieval Academy.

Wait, what? – Wait, what?

Same great game, brand new art. And a few updates to make it a little better, too. Let’s talk about it.

Game

Medieval Academy is a game for up to five knights-in-training, designed by Nicolas Poncin and published by Blue Cocker Games.

This game is appropriate for gamers age 8 and up and it takes about 30 minutes to play. We’re mostly going to talk about the new version in this review.

Art

Let’s talk about the art in this game. This is one of the things that has been completely re-done, both art and graphic design. There’s now a central board with seven different tracks, and each player gets a set of tokens in a different color AND shape to track their progress along the tracks, and a little “diploma” with two wheels to track their score.

The card art is cutesy and it pictures an anthropomorphic white cat, going about various tasks in their training. Each value has a different picture that reinforces whether this card represents a lot of advancement at that task – or just a little.

Mechanics

So, let’s talk about how to play Medieval Academy.

The game is played over six rounds, and each round has three parts: drafting cards, then playing cards to move up tracks, then scoring some or all of the tracks.

Start each round by dealing out five cards to each player. Everyone chooses a card to keep, then passes the rest of their hand in the direction shown on the board. Keep doing that until everyone has chosen five cards.

In the next part, players take turns playing out cards from their hands. Each card corresponds to a specific path; so play it and move your token that many spaces.

After every one has played FOUR of their five cards, discard the fifth one. Now it’s time to move on to scoring.

For most tracks, points or bonuses are awarded based on relative position – who’s first, who’s second, or who is last. The Kitchen track is scored first. And that’s because the first, second, and third players on this track get to move extra spaces on a single track of their choice.

Most of the other tracks either award points to the first, second, and third players, or they take points AWAY from the last and second-to-last players.

The one exception is the King track. This track awards points to every player who has crossed a certain threshold.

Some tracks score every round and some only score after specific rounds. Thankfully, there’s a reference card for each player to remind them of how things score and when… and to remind you to reset some of the tracks after the third round.

At the end of the sixth round, EVERY track scores, and whoever has the most points, wins the game.

The rules also have a variation for playing at two players – in which scoring works a bit differently. And a “night side” of the board, which adds more strategy to some of the tracks.

Changes

Before we get into our expectations and surprises, let’s talk about the changes in the new version of the game. We mentioned at the top that this is a reprint of the original Medieval Academy. Anitra, what has really changed here?

Well, the rules have been updated and made a lot clearer.

Also, we mentioned the art, but there’s been a bit of a theming change as well. Instead of “gallantry” and “charity”, there is now “cooking” and “town” tracks – but they still work exactly the same way as the old game.

Finally, and the most obvious, the old game has seven individual boards, but the new one has a single larger board with all seven tracks on it – and each player gets a “diploma” with wheels to track their score, instead of receiving little point chips as they did in the older version. (So many little point chips!)

Expectations

So, let’s talk about expectations. Anitra, what did we expect from Medieval Academy?

I don’t know. We had this older version sitting on the shelf for a long time, but we had never actually gotten around to playing it. I heard it was good. Getting the new version was finally enough to push us to try it.

I was super excited for this game and I’ll tell you why: Like Anitra said, we had the old version on the shelf. And I had picked it up because I heard great things about this game! I knew this version “fixed some small issues” with the old game, and so I figured it would just be a better version of it. I didn’t have any nostalgia associated with the old Medieval Academy, so I was ready to fall in love with version 2.0.

Surprises

So let’s talk about what surprised us…

Sure!

After playing the old version once, I liked it OK, but there were a few things I struggled with, like the stuff in the rules. So I was definitely surprised by the number of things that changed for the better in this newer version. We listed most of them, but one we didn’t, was the new solo mode.

Here, you set out five stacks of cards to draft from. Your automatic opponents draft the highest card available to them, and then play cards randomly from their “deck” of five. It works really well to help a solo player hone their strategy for the game.

There’s a lot to think about with where you want to be on each track in relationship to the other players, and once you understand that, it will inform a lot of your choices on which cards to draft, too.

Regarding surprises, I was surprised that they really did go soup-to-nuts with this game, and do a little bit of touching in a lot of different places.

Yeah, almost everything.

But talking about very specific pieces, I really loved how much easier the game was to set up with only one board. It just seemed like it flowed better getting it to the table.

Also, I really appreciated how the different shaped tokens for each player on the tracks were, because it helps with things like color blindness. But! I didn’t actually like them.

Yeah, they fell over a lot?

The discs of the old game just stacked better. Maybe if they were bigger (the new tokens), or maybe if they just screen printed on discs, it would have stacked a little bit easier. And I would have liked that a little bit more. I haven’t really decided which set of art – old or new – I actually like the best.

They’re both good.

The way the box is organized also makes it a lot faster to set up, in addition to the single board. Each of the five players has a compartment for just their supplies, and then there’s a sixth compartment in the box for the cards and the shared supplies. We can pull this box out and be ready to go in two minutes.

Recommended?

So, we ask the question, do we recommend Medieval Academy?

It’s been a classic since it was originally released more than ten years ago. But now it’s way easier to get a copy. It’s a great family game that takes less than an hour to play, and this newer version is going to be much easier for families to jump into.

We give Medieval Academy 3½ Knights out of 5.

And that’s Medieval Academy – in a SNAP!

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Medieval Academy from Blue Cocker Games (via Flat River Games) for this review.

This post contains affiliate links, which do not change your price, but help support The Family Gamers.

SNAP review music is Avalanche, provided courtesy of You Bred Raptors?