I’ve loved Orléans for a decade now. Twice it’s made it into the top 20 of my top 100 games of all time, which is not a small feat when you consider how many games on that list get shuffled around. Whenever I think about Orléans, it’s mostly fond memories. Those plays where you manage to pull everything you need from the bag, where you’re one turn ahead of someone, blocking them from building guild halls, or just the fact that when you play Orléans, everything just feels satisfying. But something unexpected happened recently. I joined a two-player tournament for Orléans on Board Game Arena and played ten two player games in fairly quick succession, and by the end of it, I found myself a little less in love with the game than when I started.

But before I get into that, it’s worth touching on what Orléans actually feels like to play. At its heart, it’s a bag-building game where you’re slowly constructing a pool of workers. Everyone starts with the same handful of tokens, and each round you’re drawing a number of workers from your bag and slotting them into these little “recipes” on your board to make things happen. Those actions might get you more workers, push you up tracks, or unlock new abilities. Most of what you do feeds back into this loop of adding workers to your bag to expand your capabilities, improving your board, or letting you draw more workers each round. And that sense of constant forward motion is a big part of the appeal.

The tracks in Orléans are the focal point of the game. In general, you’ll take an action, you move up a track, and you usually get two things: a new worker corresponding to that track, and some kind of bonus. Farmers get you food, fishermen bring in coins, guards increase how many tokens you draw each round, and craftsmen let you place these little gear tiles that permanently discount your actions. Those gears are especially satisfying, locking in an efficiency boost that you can’t ever undo, but also means you’ll never have to pay for it again. There is also a track that will give you new actions, which can either tweak something you already have access to, or give you entirely new, often better, actions to work with. And then there’s the development track, which is a score multiplier for the end of the game. Ignore that track at your own peril.

Alongside all of those tracks, you’ve got movement on a map. Using carts on roads and boats on rivers, you’ll race to establish guild halls in cities. There’s only one spot per city (except in Orléans), so getting to each city first matters. A lot. At the end of the game, a large portion of your is the combination of how many citizens you’ve picked up and how many guild halls you’ve placed, multiplied by your development level. I find it endlessly satisfying at the end of the game when players are rushing about trying to drop as many guild halls as possible, to jump ahead on the road and put a house up right before they arrive. I know, I’m evil.

One of the more subtle pressures in Orléans is that nothing is infinite. Tracks have caps, worker pools can run dry, and if a type of worker is gone, the track becomes unavailable to everyone, even if you haven’t maxed out that track yet. So there’s this constant race happening. Often, being just one step ahead or other players on these tracks is often enough to completely derail what they were hoping to do.

What I’ve always loved about Orléans is that sense of progression. You start off painfully weak, and almost everything you do makes you better. You draw more tokens, your actions get cheaper, your options expand. By the end of the game, when you’re pulling eight workers out of your bag and some of your key actions only cost one or two workers, it feels great.

With more than two players, the game really sings. People are constantly sniping the thing you were just about to do, finishing a track to snag a citizen, grabbing a new action tile, completing a beneficial deed one turn before you, it all forces you to stay flexible. There’s a nice amount of tension around the shared spaces that makes the turn order feel really consequential, especially those citizens that reward whoever finishes something first.

But in that two-player tournament, something else emerged. Everyone seemed to fall into very well-worn strategies almost immediately. It didn’t take long for optimal openings to reveal themselves, and once they did, it felt like deviating from them was just… wrong. You’d have to prioritize those development tiles that make your actions cheaper, because if you don’t, the other player will take them all and run away with the game. I had one match where that happened, he ignored them and I hoovered them all up. By round 10 of 18 my opponent basically said, “I don’t think I can come back from this,” and he was right. I was drawing eight workers and paying one or two workers for most of my actions while he was paying three, the math just doesn’t work in his favour, especially because we were both hitting that draw cap.

The same thing happens with the tiles that grant new actions. In theory, having access to all of them when you gain one is exciting. It lets you tailor your strategy to the emerging situations. In practice, it often leads to players picking the same strongest or most comfortable options over and over again. Over multiple plays, especially back-to-back plays in a tournament, that starts to feel boringly repetitive. The variety is technically there, but you have to choose to engage with it, and optimal play doesn’t always reward that.

So between the potential for runaway leaders and the emergence of scripted openings, is Orléans still a game I’d recommend? Yeah, I think it is. But with a caveat. I think Orléans is at its best with more players, where the board state is more chaotic, the competition is tighter, and you’re forced to adapt more often. That’s where the game feels alive.

I also know there are variants that limit the available tiles to a small display instead of the full set, and I might prefer that approach when it comes to playing 2 player games. It nudges players toward trying different things and occasionally making suboptimal choices, which paradoxically often makes the game more interesting.

Even with some of the shine worn off, Orléans is still a great bag-building game. And the fact that it took me 20 or 30 plays to even start feeling that fade says a lot. Any game that hits the table that many times has earned its place in my top 100, even if it’s no longer quite as untouchable as it once felt.