A perpetual argument amongst ignorant anglophones in the board game community is how you pronounce certain game tiles. Orléans gets the or-LEENZ or OR-le-enh. Being a written medium, I don’t need to wade into this argument. I have the benefit of copy and paste, then everyone can read the word how they choose. My dilemma is if I include the accent over the e or not. Including the accent is technically correct, but leaving it off is almost certainly better for SEO. Is my goal with this blog to be seen, or is it more important to me to be correct? Bah, who’s even searching for Orléans these days, anyway?

Released in 2014, Orléans by designer Reiner Stockhausen hit the scene to critical acclaim, and was promptly nominated for the 2015 Kennerspiel des Jahres. Now, it lost to Broom Service, but I think that speaks more to the proclivities of the Spiel des Jahres judges, and less about the quality of the game itself.

Orléans is a bag building game. Players pulling worker discs from their sacks, then placing them on various work houses on their player boards. Once an action has all the necessary staff, players take turns activating those actions. Generally, they gain a new worker disc, and move up the corresponding track, gaining a specific benefit. Then, the worked workers are also tossed back into the sack until it’s time to draw again.

The actions you’re taking in Orléans are all fairly simple. You move a meeple around a board, dropping guild houses in each of the cities (hopefully doing so before your opponents). You’re earning coins, books, citizens, building new technology tiles, and eventually, sending your staff to the town hall, where they will go onto contribute beneficial deeds, and then… never come back to work for you?

Okay, the theme falls apart pretty quickly when you try to examine it closely. But what’s important here is that the game mechanics are solid. Each turn, you pull a handful of disks out of your bag, and you get to decide which actions you want to take that turn. Sometimes, you’ll be blocked out of an action because you didn’t pull enough blue fishermen. Other times, you’ll draw 4 of him, and get to do almost nothing anyway. I know that doesn’t sound like fun, but bear with me here. I promise it gets good.

The score track in Orléans features these development status spaces, which has the opportunity to multiply some of your endgame score (your guild halls + your citizens). I’ve already touched on the guild halls, just litter them across the province. The citizens generally rest at the end of each of the tracks, which means gunning for one of them is going to fill your bag up with one type of worker. Another way to earn those citizen tokens are for being the last person to contribute to a beneficial deed. In classic group project fashion, all the glory goes to whomever reads the conclusion, not whomever did the most work.

Orléans often feels like a race, you’ll nervously eye your opponents player boards trying to ascertain if they’ll be able to snag the bonus tile that you’re gunning for, or waiting for just the right moment to place your workers onto the beneficial deeds track. Remember, those workers won’t ever come back to your sac, but a well-timed placement can net you one or two of the coveted citizen tokens that multiply your development status.

On one hand, It’s hard to compare Orléans to anything else I’ve played because it feels so unique. Other bag builders (Quacks of Quedlingburg and Automobiles) don’t come close to the same feeling of strategy and engine building that Orléans offers. Crafting your bag to deliver you the perfect workers turn after turn feels satisfying. By the end of the game, you’ve built several new action spaces that only you can use, you’ve covered 4 worker spaces with gears so the actions have become way cheaper, and you’re pushing up on the end of each of the tracks. Orléans

There is such a sense of progression in Orléans. Your bag grows and shrinks, disks come in as you take actions and go up the tracks, and flow out as you commit them to the beneficial deeds. Your actions get stronger as you crawl up those tracks, making it feel like you’re making way more progress that you ever thought possible at the start of the game. That said, Orléans can be a long game, 2 hours or more in the higher player counts. It’s not terrible, but considering you’re kind of doing the same 6 actions/ manipulating the same tracks over and over, it can start to drag if players are ruminating too much on their turns.

It’s kind of fascinating to have such a luck element such as bag building in a strategic euro game. I feel like I should be frustrated by the handcuffs of only being able to take the actions based on the workers that came out of the bag. But that luck is what makes Orléans special. Also, it feels like there are several paths to victory, from having guildhalls all over the place, to running up on the tracks, to just amassing an impressive hoard of goods tiles.

Orléans is one of those rare Euros that manages to be both strategic and a little chaotic. You craft your bag and then just hope the right people show up to work. It rewards careful planning and punishes tunnel vision, offering a dynamic bag-building arc that’s hard to replicate elsewhere.

It’s not perfect. The theme barely hangs together, the rounds can DRAG with overthinkers, and at higher player counts it might outstay its welcome. But what it lacks in narrative flair, it makes up for in mechanical satisfaction.

For Euro fans who enjoy engine-building with just enough luck to keep things spicy, Orléans is a classic for good reason. It’s easy to teach, deeply replayable, and always leaves you wondering how you could’ve done just a bit better.