The Expansions That Complete 7 Wonders: Leaders & Cities Review

Welcome to this week’s review! A few weeks ago I discussed the base game for 7 Wonders, and this week I thought I’d cover the first two expansion for the game. So without further ado, let’s jump into my thoughts.

First up is 7 Wonders: Leaders. The second edition version of the expansion adds two new wonders and 55 leader cards (including six specifically for the Cities expansion).

At the beginning of the game, each player is dealt four leader cards and, like drafting Age cards, each player drafts one leader and then passes their hand to their neighbor. This continues until each player has drafted a hand of four leaders. Then, at the beginning of each Age, each player has the opportunity to play a leader card by paying its cost in coins. Afterwards, players receives the effect of all of their leaders in play for the rest of the game.

Each of the leaders are unique and often push you towards certain strategies; an example is focusing on collecting science tags or investing in military cards. While at first glance it may look like this expansion doesn’t add much to the base game, the leader cards have a big influence on how each game plays out. In particular, it’s fun to draft a hand of leaders and then work out an ideal strategy of when to play each of them. The leader cards also help to provide some direction at the beginning of the game in terms of which areas to focus on. However, the core tactical decisions remain and you may have to adapt which leaders to focus on depending on which Age cards you accumulate throughout the game.

In terms of the two new wonders, both of them leverage the leader cards for interesting effects and add some nice variety to the wonder pool. The Roma wonder allows you and your neighbors to play leaders cheaper (a very nice benefit), and constructing certain stages of the wonder allow you to play additional leaders. Where Roma encourages you to play more leaders, the Abu Simbel wonder has you effectively discarding previously recruited leaders to gain victory points at the end of the game equal to double the cost of the leader. Both of these new wonders are fun to play and open up new paths to victory.

Next up is the 7 Wonders: Cities expansion. Like Leaders, Cities also adds two new wonders, as well as 42 city cards, diplomacy tokens, and debt tokens.

The city cards are divided equally across the three Ages, and during setup, a number of city cards equal to the number of players are added to each of the Age decks. This effectively increases the number of turns in each Age by one, so at the end of the game, each player will have played three additional cards compared to the base game.

Like the leader cards, the city cards also add a lot of variety to the game. Each city card is unique, and since only a small number of them are added to each game, there is a ton of replayability depending on which ones are randomly chosen.

The city cards operate very similarly to the normal Age cards, but one new effect is the introduction of diplomacy tokens. When a player plays a card with a diplomacy symbol, they take a diplomacy token, which removes that player from the military phase at the end of the round. Players with diplomacy tokens don’t participate in conflicts during that Age, so they don’t score victory points (both positive and negative) during the conflict phase. Also, since players with a diplomacy token don’t participate in the conflict, each of their neighbors are now considered adjacent to one another which may throw a wrench in your neighbors’ plans. Overall, the diplomacy tokens are also a nice way to avoid taking negative victory points when you aren’t focusing on collecting military symbols.

One of the other new additions is the introduction of debt tokens. Some of the new city cards cause other players to lose coins, and if those players don’t have the necessary coins to spend or they choose not to lose coins, they have to take one debt token for each coin they don’t spend. Each debt token is also worth one negative victory point at the end of the game. Of all the new additions, this is my least favorite as it adds a bit of “take-that”, which I don’t usually like in games. However, there aren’t that many of these types of cards, so it doesn’t feel too punishing. 

Finally, the two new wonders added in this expansion interact with the new debt and diplomacy mechanisms, but overall aren’t quite as unique or innovative as the ones in the Leaders expansion. The Petra wonder forces other players to lose coins its first stage is built, while the second stage rewards a whopping 14 victory points when completed; however, you have to spend ten coins to do so. The second new wonder, Byzantium, gives out diplomacy tokens and victory points when each of its two stages are built. While these aren’t quite as fun as the new wonders in Leaders, I still appreciate the added variety.

Overall, I have really enjoyed including both the Leaders and Cities expansions to my games of 7 Wonders. When both are in play, they add some additional depth to the game, as well as introduce a lot of replayability that keeps the game feeling fresh. As I mentioned in my top 5 board game expansions, if I were forced to only choose one, it would be Leaders, but both are still excellent additions for anyone who enjoys the base game of 7 Wonders.  

With that, I’ll wrap up this week’s review! Do you have a favorite expansion or way to play 7 Wonders? I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the games I’ve mentioned or future content suggestions in the comments below. Happy gaming!

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