At the end of the game, a final courtship phase considers all four phases. The player with the estate that appeals to the Fairchilds most will win the final matchmaking event. This, combined with an accounting of points related to estate improvements and social connections, will decide the ultimate winner regardless of who enticed the final courtship. The Cavendish family is ready to make some improvements. Game Experience: Obsession, then, is a game of carefully planning your various actions, ensuring you have both the staff (meeples) and the ladies and gentlemen (cards) available to carry them out. There’s a very satisfying feeling of ‘getting stuff’ when you carry out an action, because you not only get the bonus from the tile (money, in the afternoon ride example) but also the bonuses from each of the cards you played. Your money goes towards new tiles to add to your board, giving you more worker spaces, and more combo opportunities. It’s a really nice set of systems. I have not the pleasure of understanding you For example, we prefer to play the game with closed courtship. This means that we do not know what appeals to the Fairchilds until the end of a phase. This requires us to maintain a close race for estate points without knowing which area of appeal will turn up. But the game allows you to play this as an open option, so you’re aware immediately what to work towards, or even a random option in which a die determines when this information appears. As such, the tug-of-war of gaining esteem sits at the heart of Obsession. As you invite guests to your estate and provide repairs, you’re constantly watching your neighbor from over the hedge to see how many points they have in each area of appeal. If I host afternoon tea with the lady of the house, it will improve my estate Prestige but may see me falling behind on Service. Or maybe I really need to work on village fair planning to improve income, but then my butler will be indisposed to help me hire more staff next round.

There are plenty of games set in 19th Century England, and some are fantastic. Brass: Birmingham is a great example. All too often these games are very industrial in nature. They’re about the businesses, the resources of the time, and the Industrial Revolution. Few games take on the people of the time, and it’s a gap that Obsession gratefully squeezes itself into.

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Round 11 (Extended Game: 13) is the Builder's Holiday: players may buy any number of Improvement tiles during this round.

The solo mode in Obsession works well and is smoothly implemented. There’s a choice of opponents, and the reality of playing it means rolling a D20 and removing the matching tile from the builders’ market. There’s a little more to it than that, but what I want to stress is how easy the solo mode is to run. It’s one of those games which doesn’t alter the goal to make solo gaming fit. You can play using the same ideas and tactics you would if you were playing against real people, and that’s a really nice touch. Final thoughts Host activity: Choose tile from your estate to use this turn. Its bottom-left number must be equal to or lower than your family's Reputation. While there are expansions available for Obsession, I am yet to play with these added into the base game but I can safely say that the experience you get with just the base game itself and the amount of content available is certainly enough to keep you going for a good long while. Of course, if you are looking to play with more than 4 players, then you will want to look at getting the Upstairs Downstairs expansion that adds new families into the mix, as well as different service staff to utilise and complete activities. The Wessex expansion, as the name may suggest, adds the Wessex family into the mix, as well as new casual and prestige guests. “Flawless My Dear” I love the fact that some guests are branded as “gossips” and can be used to damage another families reputation but some of them are that unsavoury that you also damage your own reputation for simply being associated with the “gossip”. The grand monuments provide an ongoing reputation bonus, as you would imagine if you had them within your estate. You can build a Lionheart suite within your stately home and invite a prestigious guest to said suite and they are waited on hand and foot by the butler of the house. Their thanks is in the form of double rewards. Everything about Obsession has been meticulously thought out every single detail fits beautifully together like a gracious Victorian puzzle. Obsession takes Jane Austen and Emily Bronte seriously, and then goes the extra mile by wrapping the experience in a wonderful set of mechanics. There’s tableau-building as you work hard to build the most glorious estate. There’s hand management as you mull over the best gentry card to add to the current hosted event. There’s worker placement as you struggle to keep your servants available for the needs of the estate and the whirlwind of guests coming and going. Once a gentry card is used during a round, it is discarded and can’t be used again until reclaimed.

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Along with the new servants on offer, is the facility to add a 5th and 6th player to the game. This requires the Wessex expansion to utilise. There is also a plethora of both casual and prestige guests to invite during the game. There are an entire 49 new guests available to add to the base game. On top of this, there are 5 new service and improvement tiles on offer, milestones, and bigger courtship cards. The new components found in The Upstairs, Downstairs expansion will allow you to mitigate prestige limitations, hunt for tiles, screen your potential guest, refresh the market a lot easier and enhance favours earlier on in the game. Regardless of which camp you’re in, the answer is a resounding maybe. Obsession is a great game and no mistake. It may just be a little troublesome for someone unaccustomed to a modern board game’s disposition. The very first moment I beheld him, my heart was irrevocably gone Throughout the game, a competitive courtship for the hand of the most eligible young gentleman and lady in the county presents specific renovation and reputation objectives. The player who best meets these objectives while accumulating victory points will win the hand of the wealthy love interest and the game. A special mention has to go to the overall level of presentation throughout. From the portraits on the guest cards to the beautiful boxes included to store the game’s components, everything has had so much attention to detail lavished upon it. Critics might argue that the tiles are bland and uninteresting, but they’re very much about function over form. The clear iconography throughout makes it possible to discern everything you need to know about a card or tile at a glance.