The boardgame version has been getting very good reviews and ratings and it’s theme is close to our game in design, Cuzco, so I have been wanting to play this for a while now. Yesterday I finally got the chance to do so. Thank you Nokia guys! I won’t go over the details of the rules, because there are plenty of other reviews that do that already. I will try to concentrate on how I felt playing the game, what I liked and disliked.

Our gameplay

My initial thought was that there is a lot of bits and pieces! It took us some time to have everything setup. Everything looked beautiful and I was really excited to play it. It took us quite long to have the rules explained (one of us had read them before) and the first two rounds took long, because no one was really sure what was the best thing to do. After that the game started to flow better. We also noticed the typical problem with games that doesn’t have clockwise turn orders: A lot of time was spent because We were waiting for someone to notice that it’s their turn. It got better when we made a house rule that whoever was done with their turn had to say the next person’s name out loud.

After the first age, we had the gameplay down, but pretty much all of us looked like they weren’t having that much fun. The placing of colonists started to feel a bit repetitive and not that much was going on. It was the end part of the second age when things started to get more exciting. We all had found somewhat different strategies to pursue and the New World scoring was a lot more interesting than after the first age.

The third age everyone was looking for ways to score some extra VP’s and you had to fight a little bit more to achieve things. It was a good thing. For some reason I was left to do my things and was able to execute my actions almost exactly like I wanted. It confirmed my win, but I might have enjoyed it more, if it would have been more challenging. In the end of the game I got 30 out of 50 points scored from colonization scoring and won with 107 vp’s while the next had 69 vp’s. The rest of the players finished quite closely to each other. I liked how the final score is not really sure until the very end.

Theme

The theme is awesome. I didn’t feel like the theme was transfered as well as I thought it would. It felt a bit mechanical to me. It didn’t bother me too much though, I’m more of a mechanic-lover anyways. I couldn’t help but have thoughts like “This placement is similar to Davinci/Pillars/Caylus”, “oh, that’s kind of like El Grande scoring” and “ahh, these end game buildings remind me of Puerto Rico”. The mechanics worked nicely though and they have been integrated to the game well.

Exploring

I was expecting more exploring, but the discovering was fairly abstract: You just decide how many colonists you go with (from the discovery box) and then flip the card over and see if you had at least the same amount of colonists than there were natives. If yes, then you get some gold and end game VP’s. It just wasn’t as exciting as I was hoping for. As a mechanic, it worked just fine. I found myself always discovering at least with five colonists just to be on a safe side.

Specialists and warfare

I liked the specialists. They added a great deal to the otherwise little repetitive colonist placing, which is the core of the game. I had some buildings that produced me specialists every round and it seemed to be a very good thing. I also liked how warfare wasn’t the main thing, but was still an option. It was an option that only I used in our game. I managed to get a couple more majorities because of that. We didn’t have any wars, just a couple of battles.

Trade goods

I went early on to get some trading goods and managed to get two sets of 4. After that I decided to concentrate on other things. I thought trading goods as a good mechanic for the game, but collecting sets is quite abstract way to handle trading. The only difference with different trade good was the amount of them in the game.

Conclusion

I liked the game with some reservations. I will have to play more to figure out my final say on the game. If the next couple games turn out good, I might buy it. It is a solid game, that has abstract mechanisms hidden beneath a beautiful theme. For now, I will give it 8.

Would you like it? If you liked the games that this has been compared to, Caylus, Pillars of Earth and Leonardo DaVinci, I think you will like this one as well. Especially if you like the theme. It might not be suitable for you, if you prefer euro games that take only 45 minutes or so. This one definitely takes longer than that.

Cuzco Comparison

Others have asked me if it’s close to our game in design, [url=http://cuzcobg.wordpress.com/]Cuzco[/url]. My opinion is that the only similarities are theme based. The game play is totally different.