Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
There was a moment late in my first game of the medium-weight strategy game Orloj: The Prague Astronomical Clock where I pretty much landed on my final thoughts about the game.
I had just taken a turn that felt pretty dope. That turn began when I took the Construction action, and spent four resources to construct the second-to-last piece of the month dial on the big clock at the center of the board. That netted me eight points, for the gold, two wood, and paint I had spent to build it. Then I placed one of my workers on the clock, and thanks to adjacency rules, scored four more points. Then I got a bonus based on the position of that completed space on an outer wheel that surrounds the clock, a track that lists bonuses on what is known as the Painter track.
That bonus gave me a free apostle. These apostle tiles are earned and placed in one of two storage slots on each player’s personal board. As a free action, I took that new apostle and placed it in a column on my personal, 12-space apostle board. It was the third apostle in one of the columns, which earned me another bonus: an Assistant tile, which went into the newly vacated storage space where that apostle just was. I spent another resource to place the Assistant on one of my Workshop cards, which triggered a bump on my Rooster track.
Ahh, wait, I didn’t take my “hammer” bonus, I thought. In Orloj, not only do you get a bonus for placing a piece of either the month dial or the zodiac dial on the big clock (all the stuff I got from that last paragraph), but you also get a bonus from your personal “hammer card”, based on your progress on that card’s track when you complete a Construction action. I had the hammer card that gave me bonuses on the Painter track, so I moved the Painter token two spaces in a clockwise direction to move up one of the game’s three Mastery tracks twice, which got me a bonus action token, which I used immediately…to take the Construction action again.
Justin, Hold On a Sec. What’s Happening Right Now?
Orloj: The Prague Astronomical Clock is a worker placement, set collection, track-heavy, variable round structure Euro for 1-4 players. It’s a game that sometimes plays very, very fast…and at points, can play very, very slowly. To say that it is combo-rich would be an understatement, especially in the back half of each game.
That section above? You don’t know the rules of the game, or anything about the terminology I described above, unless you’ve played. I could share the rules, but the reality is, that doesn’t really matter here.
You are going to love Orloj (pronounced “OR-loy”, according to Gemini) if you meet some or all of the following conditions:
- Buy Orloj if you love Euro-style combos (think, say, Tiletum) that lead to some wild, extraordinarily satisfying turns. That turn I described above? I was still buzzing about it later, and I lost that game by a small margin. A savvy player, even during their first play of Orloj, is going to find ways to string out some sweet turns that might make other players applaud your slick planning and good fortune.
- Buy Orloj if you do most of your plays with one or two other players. I think Orloj might remain in my collection as a two-player-only game. That way, even when someone has a long turn (I’m not kidding when I say that turn I described above lasted almost 10 minutes), you have plenty to do because you are working on planning out your next turn.
- Buy Orloj if you like your Euros to be essentially themeless. I’m still not really sold on the idea that I was helping to construct this famous clock thingy in the Czech Republic of yesteryear. Mostly, I was placing workers to gather resources by triggering production engines, then working out ways to boost my color discs up tracks to get more and more bonuses. I had to check the rules file on BGG in order to remember what the names of each function even was. There are apostles, but the game doesn’t feel religious in any way. There’s a “Sculptor” token, but everyone thinks they should just refer to him as their “Apron” character. You get the idea.
- Buy Orloj if you like your Euros to be a little fussy, but generally not complicated. I’m really impressed with a couple of the teach videos I found online; you can teach Orloj live in about 15 minutes, and the game’s icons are very good as a teaching tool. YES, every game needs a player aid, and Orloj commits the crime of not shipping with one. Still, I was surprised with how “sticky” Orloj’s mechanisms were.
Not Everything is Clockwork
I have a few complaints.
This starts with the way the game’s central nerve system operates. On a turn, a player can move a clock hand in a clockwise direction a certain number of spaces for free to trigger their main action. However, they can move it further by “forcing deviations”, spending one or more of the five gear tokens at the top of that player’s board by flipping those tiles over. There’s also a second wheel that can be pushed counter-clockwise, again by forcing deviations. Lots of other actions also force deviations, and I think this whole system is meant to feel like a constraint to players initially.
In my experience, the deviation system never feels truly constraining at all. Whenever I really needed to take a specific action, there was a way to take it. Also, the gear tokens have to constantly be flipped back and forth, on nearly every turn. It just feels like a fiddly system to try and force tension, in a game that probably didn’t need it to really feel satisfying. In the back half of the game, everyone has a number of controls to get out of any tough situation, and combos usually give a player a chance to correct all deviations created even during the same turn. It’s just a bit too messy for something that ultimately feels simple.
The other big thing that rankled players is the way workers are pushed back to their owners during the worker placement step of a turn. When a player chooses a spot on the action wheel, they must place one of their workers down to take the action. If there’s already a worker there, that pushes a worker out and puts it back in that owner’s worker supply. When a player is out of workers, they have to pass, which is one of the ways the game’s clock speeds up a tad.
In one of my games, I didn’t pass the entire game. (Getting new workers into your supply is also pretty easy to do, thanks to a number of different ways that a player can earn them from their player board or through the Workshop action.) In another game, I passed three times, in part because I kept burying workers on the month and zodiac dials to earn adjacency bonuses. But this greatly changes how the game plays, and sometimes I found myself wondering if it was just a little too easy to get more workers. I don’t know if the ease with which players replenish their worker pool is a positive or a negative just yet, but I have concerns.
One thing I’m not concerned about is the Sculptor token, aka the “Apron” token mentioned above. The Sculptor action is one of the choices on the action wheel, and it serves as a secondary, slightly more expensive way to take any of the game’s main actions, tied to the “forced deviations” bit.
This whole Sculptor mechanic feels tacked on. In my second game of Orloj, I only used the “Apron” once. All game. There are so many other ways to accomplish your goals in Orloj, and then there’s this other token that can be used when the wheel ends up on the Sculptor spot. It costs deviations to take actions using the Sculptor, but, again, late in each game, breaking gears doesn’t really feel like a cost.
Prague Is a Lovely Place to Visit
Despite some of these complaints, I had a blast during my turns of Orloj, with a number of satisfying interactions with the game’s action wheel and plenty of good times stirring up a ton of combos. When it wasn’t my turn, there’s almost no interaction to speak of (outside of the area control/adjacency elements of scoring during the Construction action), so lowering the player count makes everything about Orloj a lot better.
When Orloj can play in about 90 minutes, I think that’s the sweet spot, which could be done easily with two players or possibly easy with three players, if those three players know how to play and have a couple runs under their belt.
Thanks to a limited pool of public milestone scoring options—six Mastery stained-glass tokens in the box, three of which are used in every game—and a similarly-sized pool of mid-game milestone tokens that factor into end-game scoring as well, you have a game that already is playing out the same ways in terms of the best ways to score. The hammer cards influence how each player will use their Construction bonuses, but not enough to change how someone approaches the game.
That means that after three plays, I’m enjoying myself…and, I’m not sure how much more depth I see in future plays. That places Orloj in a spot where a lot of other midweight strategy games land these days—definitely worth a look, but it doesn’t have the legs of some of my other faves of the last few years, from Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon to Recall to other Devir titles such as Bitoku and Daitoshi.
Designers Paloma J. Pascual and Abraham Sanchez Hermida have done great work with Orloj, and I’m curious to see what they dial up next. Orloj may not be a perfect product, but in a crowded space, Orloj does a lot of interesting things when it finds its time to shine.
Orloj: The Prague Astronomical Clock details
- Designer: Abraham Sanchez Hermida, Paloma J. Pascual
- Artists: Amelia Sales, Jesús Fuentes
- Publishers: Bohemian Games, Devir, DiceTree Games, Frost Bite Games, Frosted Games, GaGa Games, Galakta, Perro Loko Games, Tesla Games, Vagabund, WindFans Games
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 1 - 4
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 60 - 120 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Action Retrieval, End Game Bonuses, Rondel, Set Collection, Tech Trees / Tech Tracks, Variable Set-up, Worker Placement
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.98679 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
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