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Orléans

Orléans

Min number of participants 2
Age 12+ yrs.
Safety support by adult Not required
Min duration 1 h
Cost Medium
Environment Indoor / Outdoor

Fill your bag with citizen tokens — knights, farmers, monks, and traders — then draw them to populate your action board, travel the Loire valley, and build a trading empire in this acclaimed bag-building game.

The Essentials

Rules

  • Draw follower tiles blindly from your personal bag rather than selecting them, since the bag-building mechanic is central to the game and choosing tiles would remove the resource-management tension the game is built around.
  • Place drawn followers only into locations whose action symbols match the followers' types, since mismatched placements simply can't activate that location's effect.
  • Activate each placed location's action only once per round in phase order (not simultaneously), since the fixed phase sequence determines which players' actions resolve first and affects available resources.
  • Return used followers to your bag rather than a discard pile at the end of the round, since this ensures your bag composition (and therefore your draws) evolves as you recruit new follower types.

Tips

  • Prioritize acquiring the Trader and Farmer follower types early, since these generate the goods and income that fuel every other strategy in the game.
  • Manage your bag size deliberately rather than only adding followers, since a bag overloaded with weak or redundant followers dilutes the odds of drawing the specific types you need each round.
  • Track which locations your opponents are prioritizing, since Orleans has significant location competition and the board fills up quickly in games with more players.
  • Balance development between the trade, science, and travel/pilgrimage tracks rather than focusing on just one, since diminishing returns and limited follower slots make specializing too heavily in one path inefficient.
  • Plan two to three rounds ahead when deciding which followers to recruit, since your bag composition takes several rounds to meaningfully shift, so short-term recruiting decisions have long-term consequences.
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