A bag building game where you only have 4 meeples in your bag sounds pretty boring doesn’t it? But Lions of Lydia is anything but boring. It features super interesting choices every round and a very interactive board. On your turn you draw a random meeple from your bag. You place that on the board to either get resources based on where other meeples are placed or spend the resources to get property. These properties can give you powers that let you get more resources when you place meeples. At the end of the round you pick a new meeple to place in your bag. As you play, golden meeples will become available. They can give you coins that act as wild resources and also let you buy special property cards that will score you extra points at the end of the game.
Lions of Lydia is a smooth and fast experience. A 2-player game will take you around 30 minutes. 30 minutes of interesting choices and a great feeling of progression, that I truly enjoyed. It’s such a streamlined experience, featuring a perfect amount of bag building and pool building, and it also scales great. Not only is the base game solid enough on its own, but the game also comes with 8 mini-expansions that you can mix and match any way you like. I really love everything about Lions of Lydia; the gameplay, the vibrant art and the great production (those wooden coins and rounded bags for the meeples are fantastic). I really can’t recommend this one enough.
Erik Mclean
I love how easy this is to teach and how much game you get from such a simple ruleset. But i will say that repeat plays are going to start getting samey.