by sybrwookie
I'm a sucker for things in life that take something and twist it around to make it something else. Genre-crossing music? Great. Weird foods like blue cheese/chocolate truffles? Hilarious and awesome. So when a game comes by that is supposed to be strategic yet use dice, I'm all for it.Components
The art is completely acceptable, but nothing that REALLY stands out. Everything is symbol-based, so it takes some understanding of what everyone means before you know what is what. All the pieces feel sturdy. The boards don't have anything to hold tiles in place and you're going to be placing a lot, so a bit of jostling can be disastrous.
There are around 10-12 different types of tiles and the box comes with an insert for 6 types. I have no idea what the point of it is, I've already ordered a plano box and plan to chuck the insert as soon as possible. Expect to do the same.
As for the color-blind among us, be ready to be a bit frustrated. There is light green and dark green (which look similar on the symbol descriptions). There is a light tan, light gray, and light yellow which can be tough to tell apart if you're one who has issues with colors. And there are times where I've had tiles blend into the background of the board on me. The symbols can completely give away the tile-type, so it's not a lost cause, but color-blind, beware.
How it plays
Each turn, you roll your dice, then do one of a billion different things with them. OK, it's not that many, but you have a lot of choices: buy a tile (either with a die roll or money) and put it in your "waiting to be built" area, build a tile from the aforementioned area, get goods (OK, that's a byproduct of placing a tile), sell goods, get workers (which add/subtract from die rolls)....there's a lot you can do. There are often turns where you can't do EXACTLY what you want, but there are rarely turns where you can't do anything good for yourself. And that's what makes a good dice-based game: randomness, but not in a frustrating way.
How the Dice Work
At the start of a round (5 times per game), the board is filled with tiles, grouped together in numbers 1-6. You can use a rolled die to take any tile from the appropriate group. So, at least early each round, you should have no trouble getting a tile you want from the board.
Then on your personal tableau (of which there are "beginner" ones where they're all the same and "advanced" ones which are all different), each space for a tile is colored and numbered, so you know what color tile can go there and what number you need to use on a die to place it.
During the game, you can get goods, which also have numbers on them. You roll the right number, you can use that die to sell all of that number good for points and money.
And finally, if nothing else strikes your fancy, you can sell a die for "workers" which you spend to alter your die rolls and mitigate bad luck.
So as you can see, there are quite a few different options, which means a bad roll doesn't completely screw you. But with those options comes....
Downtime
Yea, this game is bad for AP-prone. The start of a round brings out approximately 10 new tiles per player to the main board. Some are obvious, others might take a quick glance at the rules to know what a symbol means. Even the most experienced players are going to need a moment or 3 to process everything. Newer players might take a while to take it all in, along with all the options on how to play out a turn.
Additionally, you can plan some turns ahead of time if you're planning to place/ship, but if you're looking to buy buildings, all you can do is hope the building(s) you want are still there and if not, rethink your turn when it gets to you.
Player Interaction
You can take a building someone else wants, you can take goods someone else want, you can jump up in turn order at a time that others might not like and if you fill up parts of your board faster than others, you'll get more points than others will. So the interaction is very subtle and other than losing out on a building, you don't feel like, from turn to turn, that you care about what the other person does. And since you can't do anything about a person in front of you taking a building you want, you just don't feel like you care all that much about what everyone else is doing, until you have to decide between a few tiles, and just want to take something to block someone else. I found myself sitting back and paying more attention to stuff going on outside of the game, occasionally asking, "do I go yet?" until it was my turn.
Conclusion
The game is fun! I could do without the downtime and think they dropped the ball on colors/symbols a bit, but there's a lot of little strategies to this game, as the faster you place groups of tiles down, the more points you score, which pushes you towards finishing small groups early, but if you finish larger groups, you get exponentially higher points, so there's a balance of how to score points. You want to focus some on finishing all of a single color, since you get even more points, but the boards make it so you need to place other colors to open up new areas to place tiles. It's a ton of little things that all add up to a lot of fun.