#michael rieneck

[patatedestenebres]

{Rétro2000} Cuba!

Coucou mes p’tites patates cubaines! Surprenant n’est-il pas? Une illustration de boîte d’un jeu allemand datant de 2007 juste marronnasse sur les côtés, mais belle au milieu! Mais oui, c’est pratiquement une légende urbaine, mais il en existe une poignée comme celle-ci. Voici donc un retour sur un très bon jeu de placement et d’opportunisme, de Michael Rieneck, Stefan Stadler, Michael Menzel et

View On WordPress

[abrukstuff]

Touria

Sinopse:

Touria transporta-nos para um reino imaginário, onde as torres dançam, e onde os jogadores procuram convencer a jovem princesa Tara e o esbelto príncipe Talan, de que são o melhor proveito para desposar, mas para isso é preciso demonstrar bravura e  ter riqueza cabonde! O primeiro a conseguir reunir 7 corações (bravura) e 7 moedas (riqueza/dote), sem trazer jóias negras amaldiçoadas…

View On WordPress

[ridiculousruminations]

Review - Cuba

Pre-revolutionary Cuba! An interesting place, it would seem. When you mention the country the first thing that pops in to your mind is the name Fidel Castro, but what about before? What about that fascinating period between independence from Spain and the adoption of communism? My historical knowledge concerning that part of the world isn’t great but I recently played a board game that made me want to change all that. Isn’t that marvellous? A board game that is essentially moving little pieces of wood around on beautifully painted pieces of cardboard kindled an interest in history. It was released in 2007, it’s published by Rio Grande Games and it’s called Cuba.

In my previous entry I mentioned that I would be having a board game weekend. I have a lot to show and tell from those two days, but I think Cuba was the biggest surprise. I had never heard of it, and when the board was unfolded and the pieces distributed I raised my eyebrow in suspicion. There’s a lot going on on that there board.

As confusing as it appears initially, there’s no denying that the board is decked in lush, rich colours and this extends to all of the cards and components and even to the game’s box. “A game of cigars, rum and power,” the tagline proclaims, and that summary certainly matches the game’s wonderful visual aesthetic. As the owner of the game remarked, there’s generally no excuse for producing an ugly title these days, but Cuba possess a unique and stand-out feel.

As well as the lush looking main board, we were each handed our own plantation board. You see, in Cuba you play the governor/dictator/generic authority figure of a Cuban village. Your objective is to compete with all the other villages (the other players) for resources, shipping and pesos in order to gather the most victory points. Whoever has the most precious VPs after six rounds is declared the winner. You can begin by placing a worker on your plantation board to gather resources. ‘Ah,’ I thought, ‘so this is just Agricola in a different setting then.’ For those of you who are unfamiliar, Agricola is a deservedly celebrated game that relies heavily on a worker placement mechanic in order to build the best farm in medieval Europe. Being familiar with this type of game, I started to feel at home.

Then I noticed that the board had a dynamic market for the buying and selling of products and goods. ‘Oh,’ I thought, revising my assessment somewhat, ‘it’s actually like Powergrid in a different setting then.’ For those of you who are unfamiliar, Powergrid is a game that includes a dynamic market for the buying of resources in order to build the most profitable power company in the given country.

Then I saw that there was a blind bidding mechanic in place to allow for the manipulation of Parliament in order to pass the acts that would either be most beneficial to you or that would hinder your opponents. ‘Okay,’ I thought, feeling more and more out of my depth, ‘I’ve come across blind bids in Risk 2210.’ For those of you who are unfamiliar, Risk 2210 is a game that includes a blind bidding system to determine turn order so that you can take over the whole bloody planet.

Okay so my analogies are getting a bit facetious now, but I hope you can see where I’m going with this. Cuba has a lot of different elements that you’ll have seen in a lot of different board games in the past ten years. Of course, the risk of doing such a mish-mash of rules is that it becomes exactly that: a mish – mash without meaning, direction, focus or purpose. The big surprise is that Cuba is none of those things. It makes you grit your teeth, put the bottom of your palm to your forehead and say, 'Why? Why hasn’t this been made before? Why didn’t I think of it?' That’s the thing. All of the ingredients to make this game have been around for a while, but it’s taken Cuba’s designers to blend them in to what is a delightfully rich and impressively tight title.

What do I mean by tight? I mean that the game’s got a lot going on but only six rounds for all the action to happen in. That keeps it focused, stops it meandering and it makes every choice matter. Granted, a similar tightness by time limit exists in Agricola, but here I can highlight the main difference that I see in the two. Because of Cuba’s multi-faceted engine, there are many paths to victory just like in Agricola, but whereas in Agricola you can try a combo of cards or improvements that induce a spectacular stall from which there is no recovery, Cuba is more forgiving. If you change your strategy part way through the game it won’t throttle you for it. In fact, it rewards you paying close attention to your opponents and evolving your strategy to head them off further down the line. There are just so many possibilities that even in the four player game we played, there were still a lot of buildings left un-built and a plethora of strategies that had been left untouched.

For example, in the last game I played, I attempted a big shipping control and export game. There are a lot of victory points to be had in Cuba from exporting products and goods to the ships berthed in the harbour. There can be up to three of these at once and they are drawn randomly from a deck. Each ship will have different demands, so one might want to stock up on cigars and sugar, while another might want raw tobacco, rum and citrus fruits. The longer they stay in the dock the more valuable stocking them becomes but the more likely it is that one of your opponents will have already loaded them up. The eurogame purists, who don’t like anything random in their games may baulk at the prospect of a card draw mechanic to determine what is in demand, but never fear! For it is possible to, as I did, build a lighthouse so that you can determine what kinds of ships are going to come in to play.

In the last game I mentioned, I had noticed my wife building a rum distillery, therefore I used the lighthouse to turn away ships demanding rum in order to deny her victory points and also to make sure the ships coming in wanted what I was producing. Did this screw her over completely, though? Not at all. She then built a rum café, where she could convert the rum she made directly in to VPs. Development, competition, adaption. Marvellous.

Let’s go back to that parliamentary system. You’ve got five action cards in your hand and can play four of them during a round. They represent the different people in your village from architects to tradeswomen. The one you don’t play is the one sent to lobby parliament, so if you didn’t play your Mayor, he’s going to have a lot of political sway, whereas if you played everyone except your lowly plantation worker, he’s going to have trouble convincing the higher-ups to do anything. As always, all is not as it seems though, because you can use a blind bid to buy votes for pesos. Yes, Cuba is authentically corrupt… Unless, of course, you use your hard won political sway to implement the Corruption Act! As well as doing away with corruption, you might raise or lower taxes, change the products or resources the government demands duty on, or alter government subsidy programs so that they benefit you.

Does it sound overly complicated or are you grinning and nodding? Either way, you’re going to love this game. It doesn’t take long to pick up. I know it sounds like there’s a lot to keep track of and while that’s true it’s never overwhelming even for people that are hopeless multitaskers like me. It offers endless ways to win, it offers endless ways to screw with your opponents and it looks damned pretty all at the same time. I seriously recommend this game to anyone with even a remote interest in the genre. You’ll get a wonderful hybrid of the best games currently available. It should be a directionless mess but somehow, inexplicably, beautifully, it works.