• Designers:  Fabio Lopiano, Remo Conzadori
• Solo Designers:  Lopiano, David Turczi, Xavi Aymerich
• Developer:  David Esbri
• Artist:  Edu Valls
• Publisher:  Devir
• Players:  1-4
• Age:  12+
• Duration:  90 minutes
• Times Played:  2

This is Larry and I’ve got a confession to make.  I’ve never really been a fan of circuses, not even as a child.  There’s just too much going on—without any one thing to focus on—in your average 3 ring circus for my tastes.  Despite that, there’s a romanticism associated with the old travelling circuses which is quite appealing.  Not everyone agrees with this, of course; some people can never forgive the cruel way in which circus animals were treated back then, while others will always view clowns as creepy.  Since Devir’s latest game is called “3 Ring Circus”, they’re obviously hoping there are more people out there who find circuses appealing than appalling!

In this title, each player runs a barnstorming circus at the end of the nineteenth century which tours through the northeastern portion of the U.S.  Over the course of the game, you hire artists and travel from town to town, giving performances and earning fame.  Growing your circus in the best way is no easy task, but the player who accumulates the most fame will capture the heart of America and win the game.

The gameboard shows a map that extends from Boston and Washington DC in the east to Chicago and St. Louis in the west.  It’s divided into five regions, with each region consisting of 1 main city, 2 medium cities, and 6 towns, all connected by a bunch of roads.  Cities and towns are where the players will have the opportunity to perform.  Each player is given a player board which represents their circus, with spaces for performer cards arranged in three rows of five cards each.  These simulate the three rings of their circus (yes, they’re rows, not rings, but we shouldn’t expect miracles).  Each player’s circus is represented by a caravan token and they each begin the game at a different main city on the board.

On a player’s turn, they can do exactly one of two actions:

• Engage an Artist
• Perform a Show

The game refers to the circus performers as “artists”.  No surprise there—after all, there’s nothing quite as artistic as biting the head off a chicken.  Anyway, when you Engage an Artist, you play a card from your hand to your player board.  There are three decks of cards in the game.  Money cards show the least expensive, but also least talented, artists.  These cards can also be used as currency and are the main way you pay to place other artists onto your board.  Ticket cards show the more talented artists which are the headliners of your circus.  You also begin the game with one End Game Scoring card and you can acquire more; if you play one of these to your board, it gives you a way to score VPs.

Playing a card to your board is a little more complicated than just plopping it down.  First, you have to decide which row to play it to.  Then, you have to pay for it.  Each card has a numerical value, which is also its cost.  The first card you play to a row requires you to pay its shown cost.  Each subsequent card played to that row, however, only costs the difference between the shown cost and the cost of the highest card already in that row.  So, for example, if you begin by playing an expensive card to a row, your next few plays to that row might well cost you nothing.  Of course, you had to come up with the moolah for that first card, so it all works out the same in the end, but there are obviously cash flow implications.  It’s an interesting system and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it in a game before.

In addition, after the card is played, you have to reorder the cards in the row so that they’re in strictly increasing order.  Finally, some of the spaces on the board have icons and if you cover one up, you carry out its effects, which can include drawing cards, playing a new card, swapping cards between rows, or earning VPs.  Covering up icons isn’t always a positive, though.  Some of them add to your ability to do things—for example, you begin the game with 6 train icons visible and when you move your caravan, your maximum movement is equal to how many train icons you have showing.  Some cards you play will have icons like this to add to or replace the ones you’ve covered, but usually, as you add cards to your board, your movement rate slows.  There are other effects like this as well that you have to take into account.  Of course, you can control this based on which rows you choose to fill up first.  You can also gain benefits when you complete a column of three cards in your display.  Finally, every card has an effect, in addition to its performer type and value; some of these are straightforward, while others (including most of the end-game effects) depend on where in the row the card sits and which cards precede or follow it.  So playing cards has many ramifications that you have to consider.

The other action is to Perform a Show.  This consists of three steps.  First, you must move to a different location, with your maximum movement equal to the number of train icons you have showing.  Then you must give a performance in the location you end your movement in.  You show this by placing one of your Circus tokens on the location (you can only perform in each location once).  The benefits of the performance depend on the type of location:

• Town – You get to draw one face down Money card for the town, plus one for each adjacent town that hasn’t yet hosted a show, reflecting the attendance of the local yokels who are delighted that the circus has come to town.  You may very well wind up playing some of these cards as artists, but the usual purpose for performing in a town is to get cash.

• Medium City – One of the icons that can be found on the player boards and the artist cards is a pedestal and the number of pedestals you have showing in your entire circus is what matters here.  In addition to what can be seen, each medium city has a type of performer that they like and if one of those is present in your circus, you’ll get bonus pedestals.  Each medium city has a track with numbers of pedestals and you place your circus token on the space on the track with your pedestal value.  If an opponent has already played a token there, you must play on a lower space.  Placing a token on a space gives you the choice between drawing ticket cards or earning VPs; obviously, the higher the pedestal value, the greater the reward.  There is a 5 card open display of Ticket cards; when you draw these cards, you can take one of the open cards or go with mystery meat.

• Main City – At the beginning of the game, each main city is randomly assigned a City Card that shows what kind of acts that city wants to see.  At a minimum, the city requires a specific performer to be in your circus if you wish to perform there.  Other types of performers give you bonus points if they’re in the proper position in your circus.  Here’s an example:  one city card shows that the city requires you to have an acrobat of value 9 in your circus, which rewards you some VPs.  If this acrobat is preceded in its row by an animal act performer of any kind, you earn more VPs; if it’s followed in its row by a special performer of any kind, you also earn more points.  Being the first or second player to perform in each city also yields you bonus VPs.

The third thing you do during a Perform a Show action is to advance the Barnum caravan.  P.T. Barnum operated the most famous circus in America during the game’s time period, so the game’s clock is named in his honor.  The Barnum caravan begins in one of the main cities and after each performance, it advances to the next city on the perimeter of the road network.  This perimeter includes all of the main cities.  When Barnum reaches a main city, its region is scored at the end of the round.  The player who has performed the most times in that region gets a nice VP award, with the second and third place player earning lesser awards.

Once Barnum reaches his home city (which means that all five regions have been scored), the game ends.  The players earn points for any cards in their displays with end-game bonuses and the circus owner with the highest score wins.

It’s kind of hard to categorize what kind of game 3 Ring Circus is.  There are tableau-building elements, movement, and majorities, along with a little bit of money management.  I don’t think I’d say it’s dripping with theme, but the old-style circus trappings are used consistently and influence just about every aspect of the game.  It leads to a game with an unusual feel (which I consider to be a good thing), but most of the elements are still reasonably familiar.

Similarly, identifying the best strategy isn’t that easy.  Clearly, you need to hire artists, but there’s pros and cons to going with cheap ones or starting with the more expensive headliners.  Focusing on a single row, at least initially, seems to make the most sense, but each of the rows forces you to cover up different icons when you place artists, so there’s a decision to be made there as well.  Additionally, you need to decide whether to emphasize income, pedestals, or end-game points when you place your cards.  So there’s actually quite a few paths to victory here, probably more than you’d expect in a game of this weight.

There are multiple strategies when it comes to performing as well.  You’ll need to perform in at least a few towns, because you’ll need the Money cards in order to afford your artists.  The ones with many adjacent towns tend to get snapped up early, so you have to decide if you want to go out of your way to travel to those.  Alternatively, you could focus on gaining majorities, maybe in the first region to be scored, which means trying to perform in a single region.  Or maybe you’d rather try to perform in Medium or Main cities as soon as you can; you’ll need to focus on different things for each of those.  Again, there are lots of ways to approach this game and, after all of two games, I’m not at all sure which ones are the best.

As far as player interaction is concerned, it’s a typical Euro.  It’s a race to get the best cards and to perform first in the best locations.  Scoring is through majorities, so there’s obviously headbutting there.  There are no direct attacks in 3 Ring Circus, but there’s plenty of indirect interaction and if you ignore your fellow players, you will no doubt wind up feeling like a sad clown.

I do have one negative first impression of the game, but there’s a good chance it comes more from me not grokking the proper strategy than any flaw in the design.  I say that because I’ve combed through the early reviews and comments of the game and only one or two other people have mentioned it.  Still, here’s what I’ve seen, for what it’s worth.  This game moves fast, much more so than you might think at the beginning.  Every time a player performs, Barnum’s token moves and soon that little bugger is hurtling all over the U.S.  The thing is, there’s so many reasons to take the “Perform a Show” option.  You need to do it to earn money, to snag valuable Ticket cards, to gain majorities, and to earn VPs; even if all you want to do is move (to set yourself up to get to another area), you need to perform.  So in my games, the region scorings always seemed to be triggered much sooner than I wanted them to.  Obviously, you need to choose your battles (it’s almost impossible to score well in all five regions), but getting the timing right to get your tokens down before a region is scored can be tough, at least for me.  I’ve particularly struggled with getting things done before the game ends.  Performing in my chosen Main cities, acquiring the cards and getting them played for some nice end-game points—I’ve just come up woefully short in getting these things done before the last turn is triggered.  So my main concern with this game is that it may move too fast and that while it promises you all these lovely things you can do, there just isn’t enough time to get even a fraction of them done.

But then, in my second game, one of my opponents didn’t seem to have this problem at all.  She focused on picking up the required performers for the Main cities.  She was able to perform in most of them, usually with some complimentary artists.  She finished first in most of the regions, got good end-game points, and wasn’t scrambling for money.  In short, she didn’t think the game was moving too fast.  Naturally, she destroyed us.  And while it’s possible that things just broke well for her, it’s far more likely that she gets the pacing of the game and I don’t.  That’s actually good news, because it means that this game has more to show me and I have a good deal more to learn from it.  So take my concerns about the pacing of 3 Ring Circus with a grain of salt (liberally sprinkled on circus peanuts, of course), but I did want to mention them, in case others encounter the same thing in their early games.

There’s one other design decision that I’m uncertain about, but which is also probably justified.  I said that when a region scoring is triggered that it takes place at the end of the round, but that’s not strictly true.  The last player in the game is given a tile at the beginning and when the first region scoring is triggered, it doesn’t take place until the player with the tile takes their turn.  However, after the first region is scored, the tile moves counterclockwise to the next player.  This means that for most of the scorings, the original last player will get fewer turns than the other players and the original first player will never get fewer turns for any scoring.  This seemed so bizarre to me that I checked the Geek for threads that discussed it.  It turns out that one of the designers has commented on this and he said that being the last player to play prior to a scoring was considerably more important than having fewer turns.  So they implemented this mechanism to even things out.  Now obviously, the game’s designer knows his own creation a hell of a lot better than I do, but this still feels peculiar to me.  Nevertheless, I have to assume he knows what he’s doing, so I accept this as a proper design decision, in spite of it seeming so weird to me.

3 Ring Circus also comes with a solitaire mode, in which you have to compete against an automaton circus manned with machine acts.  That’s a clever and appropriate way of framing the solitaire opponent that stays true to the theme.  Unfortunately, I haven’t played it, so I can’t judge how good this mode is.

(There’s one other clever feature to this game, although I can’t be sure if it’s deliberate or not.  One of the main cities is Indianapolis, which is a pretty smart thing to include in a game that launched at Gen Con.  Kind of like including a map showing Essen in a game set in Germany.  Like I said, I can’t be sure if this was a deliberate decision, but it’s a pretty good one if it was!)

The components are fun. The artwork throughout is vibrant and feels very appropriate to the time period and subject matter being portrayed.  There are fun solid wood cutely painted pieces to resemble a “big top” tent and there’s a fun popcorn marker to mark your position on the scoring track. The cards are vinyl and have a nice feel. The player board is just a thin sheet of cardboard, but the components work very well together. This game is also not a table hog. It’s a big presence game but not in a very overt way. 

So those are my first impressions about this new title.  Mostly positive, both with regards to its theme and its gameplay.  Because of my concerns about the pacing, which may well be spurious, I have to give it an incomplete grade for now.  I guess I need to play this a third time, which seems only fair—at a minimum, this game deserves one play for each of its three rings!

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Ben (1 play):  I have only one play with Larry and we commented about it in our TBGT write up. It’s a crunchy game that plays relatively quick but may be AP prone. There’s a nice game space to explore with the different card plays or how you place it in your player tableau. I felt like there is a tiny bit of luck with which cards are available to you on your turn but you have to work with that to choose where you are moving your carnival.

Craig M (1 play):  I had the chance to play this with three after its release at GenCon. I think the circus theme is fun and used well here and would be happy to play this game again. With respect to the question above about using Indianapolis as a key city being linked to the release at GenCon, there is a significant circus history in Indiana (and the Midwest in general) so I would be surprised if the decisions on what cities or towns to include wasn’t tied into the theme and circus history. 

Lorna (2 plays):  The game moves quickly but mostly it didn’t capture the theme for me, it didn’t really feel like there were that many interesting choices, and, in lower player counts, the market stalled, so we just drew blindly until the right card came up.

Mark Jackson (1 play): I was only able to play one game solo… and the production is really nice. (Wish more games came with cardboard sections to block out unused parts of the map with lower player numbers.) However, the automata was a little clunky and had some confusing priorities on which city to choose and which artist to hire. While the game is gorgeous on the table, the various icons are not always easy to suss out and the game wants you to do some VERY specific things in order to make scoring work.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

I love it:  

I like it:  Larry, Ben, Craig

Neutral:  Lorna, Mark Jackson

Not for me: