The peaceful idyll of a monastery garden? No way! “Heaven & Ale” is hard work. Players are trying to brew beer – preferably as much as possible and as high quality as possible. To get the necessary resources, players have to place resource and monk tiles in their cloister garden – the shady side is cheap but the sunny side costs more. The tiles produce valuable points, if a player chooses the right category to score for themselves. If a player decides to score all hops tiles in their garden, they receive hops and coins. The dilemma is that each player may only score each category once. Really you want to wait as long as possible to score but you always need some ready money. And the scoring possibilities disappear fast. Cheers!
Short video (german)
Jury statement
The clear structure of “Heaven & Ale” demonstrates that it’s not just when brewing beer that purity is a bonus: this work from the designer duo Michael Kiesling and Andreas Schmidt is satisfying right to the bottom of the glass. The no frills mechanics constantly force players to make tricky decisions. Finding the right balance of resources and the best time to make use of the limited scoring possibilities is an engaging challenge for experienced gamers.
