Your rich uncle has died. Hooray!

Those first 6 words of the rulebook set the stage for Last Will, designed by Vladamir Suchy and published by CGE in 2011. Taking the plot of 1985’s Bewsters Millions, your uncle, who has amassed a great fortune, realized on his deathbed that he never got to enjoy the fruits of his effort. So he’s provided each of his descendants a small sum, and challenged each one to live lavishly, as whomever is the best at spending money will inherit the rest of his fortune, and win the game.

All players start with the same amount of money, and each round, take turns choosing which initiative they want to claim. The earlier in turn order you want to go, the less cards, errand boys, and actions you’ll have to spend. But in a game about being the most efficient at blowing your cash, going first and getting the perfect card can be worth having less actions.

The cards you draw can be anything from companions and staff, whom you’ll want to accompany you on your events so you can rack up a bigger bill, to real estate that costs a fortune to maintain, or, can fall into disrepair forcing you to sell it at a loss, to one time events, to persistent events that you’ll be able to use round after round to drain your bank account.

The errands to choose from mostly consist of cards, including the more powerful event cards that are not in the regular decks, but also allows you to put your thumb on the scale of the real estate market, making some types of real estate more expensive to buy in a round, while making others less desirable, so they’ll sell for even less than their already bottoming price.

Beyond the errand boys, your player board and cards have will have a bunch of scarlet badges market with an A, to indicate that doing something costs you an action. Buying and selling houses, activating events, and hiring staff all take time, and therefore, cost an action. Again, the winner is the player who runs out of money first and declares bankruptcy. An important aspect to Last Will is that you cannot declare bankruptcy if you own an asset. While maintaining those houses may have been a great way to drain your cash reserves, you’ll need to sell the house and drain the proceeds from the sale if you want to claim victory here.

Last Will has a sense of levity that permeates the entire production. The art on the cards is whimsical and absurd. How much extra do you think you’d have to spend to bring your horse to the theatre? Well, in Last Will, the answer is £3. That sense of levity can fool players into a false sense of security, there are plenty of difficult decisions you’ll need to make in respect to timing and giving up actions to go earlier in the round.

The reverse scoring method also sounds simple, but it surprisingly breaks your brain in different ways. After hundreds of euro games, I’m conditioned to try and achieve the most amount of actions for the least amount of money. This was most confusing in the real estate market, when I couldn’t figure out if I wanted Farms to be more or less valuable for the round in which I wanted to offload my real estate investments.

There’s a fascinating pivot point in Last Will. The best way to lose money is via real estate, either by letting it depreciate round after round, or just by paying the obscene upkeep. But the houses that drain the most of your money also retain their value, and when you run out of cash, but still have a house, you can find yourself in a weird pinch. You don’t have the money to do anything, but you’re still a ways away from being bankrupt, and selling that house may mean dismantling your cash reduction engine, giving players who haven’t invested in real estate a chance to catch up.

Last Will‘s action selection mechanism looks fairly simple, considering the games that Vladimir Suchy has designed, but it’s finely tuned and considered. Every space on the row is a trade-off in some way. It’s finely balanced and a tight decision at the start of each round. Suchy is flexing his design muscle here and it shows.

I struggle to find criticisms for Last Will. The production is modest, I suppose. There’s no fancy components or action selection wheels with cubes falling through holes like in Shipyard or Praga Caput Regni, but those things aren’t needed here. The charm of Last Will is in the premise, the tight action economy and the inversion of everything I’ve been taught to expect from a Euro game over the last 10 years. It’s funny, clever, and surprisingly thinky, and just a joy to play. For me, it’s an easy recommendation.