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Age of Discovery Price: £19.99 Board Game; 2-4 Players; Ages 10+ by Phalanx Your king has come to offer you the opportunity to invest in the great voyages of famous explorers like Columbus and Magellan. You will need to purchase a fleet of ships, and assign them to the most successful expeditions. Of course, you will need a lot of money! To earn money, you must fulfil trade contracts. Can you balance the needs of trade with the demands of the great explorers? It is time to seek wealth and glory in the Age of Discovery! ++++++++++++++++++++ Counter magazine review ++++++++++++++++++++ Phalanx / Mayfair 2-4 players, 45-60 minutes designed by Alfred Viktor Schulz reviewed by Stuart Dagger Over the past three or four years Phalanx have gone from being a smallish presence in our type of games to one of the major publishers, but while they have attracted some star names to their list of designers, and while their games are always beautiful to look at, they have yet to acquire the reputation for reliably high quality of play that is enjoyed by Hans im Glück, Alea or Days of Wonder. With those three companies one buys with confidence; with Phalanx it is with a degree of nervousness. Good games, mediocre games and absolute stinkers are jumbled together, and so when a new title appears, most of us behave rather like the penguins who jostle each other at the edge of the ice waiting for one of the others to discover whether there is a lurking predator. It was the theme that drew me in to putting my money down for this one and, though it has provoked some controversy, it\'s not all bad. The basic idea is that you get victory points by committing ships to expeditions from the age when Europeans were discovering lands and peoples that had hitherto been out of their reach. Ships are expensive and so money has to be raised by merchant activity. So far so good, but merchant activity also requires ships, and ships that are busy earning money by trading can\'t at the same time be setting off on long voyages of discovery. It is a scenario that contains precisely the sort of conflicting claims on resources that make for a good game. There are twelve ``voyage of discovery\'\' cards - da Gama, Columbus, Drake, Magellan, and so on. Each is in one of 6 colours and displays a number which is the combined ``transport value\'\' of the ships needed to mount the expedition. These twelve cards are laid out in the centre of the table, with room below each of them for the participating ships. These total values required by the expeditions are in the range 3 to 8, and the individual ships, which come in the same six colours, have values in the range 1 to 3. The ships are cards, as are the ``trade contracts\'\'. These also are split between the six colours and, like the expeditions, display a number which is the combined transport value of the ships needed to fulfil them. Players begin with two trade contracts, 6 coins and a 2-colour flagship and on each of their turns take two actions chosen from a menu of 4: * Take 2 coins. * Take a new trade contract. * Purchase ships. * Send ships on missions. The two actions must be different, which at the beginning of the game will often seem like a spiteful act by a designer intent on ensuring that you have less money than you need! Taking a new contract is the standard routine of either selecting one of four face-up cards or taking the top card of the face-down deck. Either way the card will cost you a coin. You may only take one new contract per turn and there is a hand limit of 4, which is tight enough to make you think about what you are doing. The ship display is more complicated. There is a so-called ``purchase row\'\' of 5 cards and above this a ``filler row\'\', also of 5. Ships can only be bought from the purchase row. Gaps created by purchases are filled by moving down the card immediately above the gap, and the resultant space in the filler row is then filled from the deck. The effect is to make planning easier by telling you not only what is available, but also what is in the offing and what you need to do to get at it. When you are buying ships, you are not limited to one per turn, but since the cost of a ship is 3, 4 or 5 (depending on its transport value), you won\'t be buying them in big batches. Money is tight in this game and when you do get some together it is quickly spent. Ships are sent on either trade missions, expeditions, or a mixture of the two. The only limits are what ships you own and whether you can afford to pay the crews. To launch a trade mission you play one of the trade contract cards from your hand together with one or more ships. These ships must be of the same colour as the trade contract and their combined transport value must exactly match its stated requirement. This is where your flagship is very useful. Not only can it be one of two colours, but you can set its transport value at either 1, 2 or 3 - whichever you need to get the total exactly right. A very neat idea this one, as it supplies you with just the right amount of wriggle room needed to turn what could have been a frustrating set of conditions into one you can plan around. Each ship card costs you 1 coin to play, except for the flagship which costs you 2 (prettier uniforms?). Having played the card and the associated ships, the player now decides whether the voyage is to last 1, 2 or 3 turns. The longer the voyage, the higher the profit, but of course it does mean that your ships are out of commission for that much longer. There are no risks attached to the journey and once it\'s complete, your ships are returned to you. The trade contract card then goes out of the game, but you keep track of how many contracts you have completed, as it will affect your score at the end. Sending ships to join an expedition takes them out of use for the rest of the game but brings in victory points, once at approximately the halfway stage of the game and again at the end. The first ship committed to a particular expedition sets the ``ship colour\'\' for that expedition and all ships that join it in the future must be of the same colour. The other restriction is that the combined transport value of the ships on an expedition can\'t exceed the number stated on the card. As with trade voyages, each ship placed will cost you 1 coin to pay for the crew. The victory points scored at the two scoring points are higher if the ship colour matches that of the expedition card, and the cards that require higher total transport values for their completion give more VP per ship than those whose requirement is lower - both facts you need to consider when deciding where to place your ships. This dual use for ships is one of the game\'s defining features, forcing you to plan and to make choices. Keeping the ships back for trade missions has the obvious advantage of bringing in much-needed money and boosting your total of ``trade missions completed\'\'. However, if you hang back too long, you are liable to find that the expedition you wanted to go on turns you down, as it already has a full complement of ships. There is also the halfway scoring to consider. So far everything about the game is commendable, and I haven\'t yet finished, for there are two more nice wrinkles that deserve a mention. The first is that you get notice of the halfway and final scorings. The trigger mechanism for both is the familiar one of a card being turned over, this time in the ship deck, but instead of the scoring taking place immediately, everyone gets one more turn before the tally starts. The other is the small number of one-use ``action cards\'\' that you are each given at the start. One type enables you to play a ship as though it were of a different colour - useful for both trade missions and expeditions. The second enables you to put a ``reserve for 1 turn\'\' marker on a card, meaning that no one else can buy it until your next turn comes round - useful if there is a particular ship or trade contract card that you want but won\'t be able to afford until next turn. The controversial feature of the game is the ``special mission\'\' cards. Each player is dealt one at the start of the game and at the end they will get a bonus added to their score according to how well they have fulfilled it. One gives you points for each expedition on which you have at least one ship; another for each expedition where you have at least half the ships; a third for each expedition where you have a majority of the ships and a fourth for each expedition where you own all the ships. The number of points in each case depends on how many trade contracts you have completed, and on a like-for-like basis as far as the trade contracts are concerned, the harder the mission, the more the points. The bonuses are significant components of your final score and the argument is over whether the mission cards are balanced. Greg Schloesser has gone on the net to state in no uncertain terms that they are not; the developers have replied that if you adapt your strategy to your card, they are. I have not yet played enough to come down on one side of the argument or the other, but what is certain is that it is much easier for a player new to the game to gain a big bonus from the first card than from the others and that the fourth card can prove disastrous if you don\'t get it right. I don\'t mind this sort of thing in principle, provided the cards really are balanced and provided the rule book gives you some strategy notes to put players who have drawn the harder cards on the right lines. I am not suggesting that the publishers tell you so much as to take away from players the pleasure of exploring the game, but they do need to say enough to head off unenjoyable playings and a game being tossed prematurely on to the scrapheap. Suggestion: If the rest of the game appeals and you don\'t want to run the risk of players complaining that their chances of winning were destroyed by the special mission card they were dealt, adopt Valerie Putnam\'s suggestion of allowing each player to choose their mission card at the end of the game and allowing more than one player to make the same choice. This retains the ``secret\'\' aspect, allows players to take the harder / more interesting option if they choose, but gets rid of any causes for complaint. In summary, this is a game which has a lot going for it, but which has one feature on which a Z-bend sign - for danger - should have been posted. It isn\'t necessarily a fatal flaw, but it does have the potential to be a game wrecker unless you either take steps to get round it, or discover the strategies which the rulebook declines to discuss. More ...

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