The Board Game Luthier Sounds as Good as It Plays

By Keith Law | November 5, 2025 | 2:30pm

Tabletop Reviews board games

The Board Game Luthier Sounds as Good as It Plays

Luthier is a gorgeous new game that asks players to build new instruments and commission performances for their hoity-toity patrons, a Euro worker placement game that doesn’t feel so stuffy because of the wonderful art and components. Co-designed by Dave Beck, who gave us 2023’s Distilled and owns publisher Paverson Games, it’s one of the best new games of 2025—and, in a rarity for tabletop games, it comes with its own soundtrack.

In Luthier, players play as families of luthiers, starting the game with three family-member workers but adding two more as the game progresses. Each family member has a different strength from 1 to 5, and players can also hire temporary apprentices to make their actions more powerful. You’ll send your workers out to collect blueprints for instruments or repair orders, to gather resources, to arrange performances to gain money, to hire patrons, and more; or you can place a worker in your own workshop to construct instruments, which requires two separate turns once you have all the resources. The goal is to maximize your victory points by completing instruments, placing seats in the orchestra, satisfying your patrons’ needs, and achieving objectives. It’s a long game, with a listed time of 90-150 minutes that isn’t kidding, although once the game is set up, it hums pretty quickly and the game becomes less complex as you play because you understand what actions you must take.

Luthier’s soundtrack comprises 11 songs from three periods of classical music, starting with Pachelbel’s “Gigue in D Major” and ending with a pair of string quartets by Tchaikovsky. I asked Beck why he chose to spend the time and money required to create this soundtrack, which is now available to everyone after a brief period where it was available just to backers. “I’m a firm believer in the idea that when you gather folks around the table to play a game, it is an ‘occasion’ and not just something that should be taken lightly,” he said. “So much of our lives is now on the screen or hurried, that having moments where we can all gather and just enjoy the experience itself is important.”

Most Popular

Luthier board game review

Beck also previously commissioned some ambient music to serve as a soundtrack for Distilled on TabletopAudio.com, and says he uses appropriate background music or sound to enhance the playing experience of many games. “When I gather friends together to play Captain Sonar, I have the submarine echo-location radar pinging in the background. When I play Dead of Winter, I choose a selection of winter/windy sounds as well as creepy background creaking noises, to give you the effect of an abandoned area in the cold, dark winter. I try to ‘curate’ every experience I can for games I play with friends, as I think it simply upgrades that experience around the table. If I could, I’d perhaps include smell and lighting more as well, but usually that is too hard or distracting, since you have to actually see the game.”

Musicologist and pianist Kevin Ngo helped curate and arrange the soundtrack for Luthier, and the Cascadia Strings quartet recorded the 11 pieces, each of which was written by a composer who appears somewhere in the game. Beck and company also created a nine-hour playlist on Spotify that includes 70 songs, with at least one from every composer in the game, and a whole lot of Bach; put together, it’s enough music to get you through four full plays of the game, although that doesn’t include setup and cleanup time.

Whether it was the theme or the success of Beck’s previous game, something about Luthier obviously sounded good to players. The Kickstarter raised just under $800,000, a sizable sum. The finished result is a base game that comes in at $69 and an all-in version—with all the upgraded components, including a giant neoprene mat and a pipe-organ dice tower—costing $279.

The game has a huge table presence even without that dice tower, and that’s going to intimidate a lot of players, especially new ones. Once you learn the mechanics the game’s internal logic takes over, though. You will use all of the spaces on the board, although your focus will shift over the course of the game. Turn order definitely matters, with some of the common spaces (not the ones in your own workshop) limited to a certain number of workers. There also aren’t a lot of ways to go wrong—it’s a game that rewards optimal placements, but you’re probably going to have something worth doing at any given time. The only real complexity here is the potential for analysis paralysis—we all know a few of those players—while the game itself is much more of a midweight Euro.

As a philistine when it comes to classical music, I have little to offer on the soundtrack other than to say it strikes the right chord (pun intended), setting an appropriate mood for the game’s theme and artwork, without becoming so obtrusive that you might need to turn it down. It’s not necessary, but it’s emblematic of the incredible effort Beck has put into both of his games so far.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.