Image credit: BGG

While education may not be the most exciting theme for a game, it can be used to decent effect. In Alma Mater by Eggertspiele, you're the headmaster of a school trying to recruit the best students and professors into your academy and master all four of the game's disciplines.

Except in reality, this is just another TPSE (Themeless Point Salad Euro) where you're converting books (resources) and money (ducats) to buy things and get points. While the components are really nice, the theme couldn't be more pasted-on unless it was a print-and-play.

That's fine (and to be expected), but resources books and money are so hard to come by, you spend most of your actions each turn trying to get what you need and not actually doing anything. You only start with four workers, and there are limited spaces on the board to acquire students or professors. While you can mitigate being "blocked out" of an action by using more workers than the spot's previous user, you still need to dedicate at least one or two of them to acquiring the books and/or money to do the action.

Frankly, that's this game's biggest problem. With six rounds, and (feasibly) only one productive action each round, you feel like you've accomplished next to nothing by game's end.

Additionally, the two-player mode is flat-out garbage. An automated third player comes into play, and this guy shoots up the knowledge track with no limitations, blocks 2–3 action spots each round, and never buys books from the players, making money an even tighter commodity than it usually is. Buying books from other players is the primary source of income in this game, and taking that out made everything harder than it already was.

Recommending this game would have been difficult to begin with, as a TPSE is always a tough sell for me. However, the miserable two-player mode makes this unwelcome in our home.

That being said, the game gets a "C" for gameplay and mechanics, a "D" for originality, and an "F" in scalability. Alma Mater fails to attain a passing grade, and should be held back until further notice.

FINAL RATING: 2/10