Let me start off by saying that I’m not a supporter or smoker of weed in any fashion. In fact, things with the marijuana symbol plastered all over them usually bother me. But why not this board game? Just look at it! Most weed items you see are lighters or a deck of cards. This game looks like it should be sitting up near my collection with Axis and Allies or Risk! Because it looked so awesomely complicated for a marijuana game, I knew it must be mine, and Adult Sex Toys offered to send it to me for review to fulfill that need.
Lords of Cannibis is, as you could guess, a board game. It’s made for 2-6 players. The entire game is based off of board game called Settlers of Catan. I have honestly never heard of this game in my lifetime, but for some odd reason, one of my gamemates had. Considering this a German board game, I slightly question his sanity. The tagline for this board game is “The Strategic Game of Reaping, Corruption, and Conquest”. As you can imagine, this is a strategy game. The game includes a lot of different pieces including 125 Resource cards, 38 Crop cards, 2 Dice, 6 Building Tiles per color, 6 Oversized Reference cards, 2 Reward cards, 1 Sheriff Badge, 24 Numbered Chips, 14 Tunnels Per Color, a board game, and the instruction book.
The instruction book lays out the rules pretty clearly, but honestly, I’m reading this retroactively instead of before we played. Since that had that player who had played before, he pretty much explained all of the rules.
This is a really hard game to explain, but I’ll try my best. Basically, all of the different players get a different color. The board shows little squares with resources on them. Players place their “homes” on one side of the little square. Each little square has a number inside of it. Each time anyone rolls that number, every little home touching that square gets to take a resource that is depicted in that square. Players take turns rolling the dice then using their available resources to build new little homes. There’s a lot of rules about building the homes though.
The homes can only be built where you’ve built at least two roads from your last home. The roads take resources. There’s rules about how close your homes can be to opponent homes.
There’s special achievements that you get by having lots of roads, lots of homes, or rolling the number seven. There’s also some achievements that you can get by trading in some of your resource cards to collect some of the Crop cards. Crop cards allow you to earn extra total points to win or to use special thief cards against your opponents.
Basically, you win by making it to “ten” points first. Each house you have is a point. Each upgraded house you have is an extra point. Some of the Crop card provide more points. There’s a little bit more to it than I explained, but really, that’s the entire game stripped down to the bare bones.
We ended up playing this game with six different players. While it was possible and relatively painless to do so compared to four users, I’d still recommend the “optimal” player count is four. Two is too easy, six can be too confusing at times, but four really has enough difficulty while still keeping the game moving along at a relatively fast pace. The problem with six players is that the game seems to drag along a little bit because of how long each player’s turn takes.
Playing with six players took us about two and a half hours before anyone won. The game was still fun up until the end, but at points, it could get frustrating because it wasn’t your turn and you were getting bored. Less players would have cut down on the total time to play. Honestly, half-way through the game, we all forgot we were even playing a game about weed, and they just become more of general cards and game material, so the marijuana part wasn’t that important.
The game was fun to play though. As fun as a strategy game can be really. It required some fast thinking, good strategy, and a lot of looking to the other player’s future turns. (Which is something I don’t think potheads do very well, so this game seems a little odd.) It was enjoyable to play, and the hardest part was honestly learning the rules. Once you got the rules down, the game was pretty easy. It definitely required some thought to it, and while it wasn’t quite as strategic as Axis and Allies or Risk, I’d put it on a “thought-requirement” level around Monopoly.
Is it offensive at all? Not really, unless you have someone in your group of friends who is against the idea of being a “majijuana lord” attempting to take over the sale spots of the other “lords”. There really isn’t much to do with the marijuana aside from the theme of the game. You don’t even have to have any knowledge about majijuana or anything to be able to play this game with skill.
So my final words? It was a fun board game that required some strategy. It definitely wasn’t anything I was expecting to see from a weed board game. It actually was pretty fun to play, and while I recommend only using around four players, you can go up to six for larger groups. It makes for a fun night as long as you can keep the pace of the turns going smoothly. Adult Sex Toys sells this adult game, so thank them for sending me this boardgame for my Lords of Cannibis Review.
