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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Rio Grande Games | Batavia

Batavia

Price: £39.99

This item usually ships in 2 to 3 days.

RRP - £48.99

Board Game, 3-5 Players, Ages 10+ by Rio Grande Games Magnificent sunsets, exotic flora and fauna, the aroma of finest spices in the air – the Far East has always had a magical appeal to adventurers, soldiers of fortune, explorers, traders and merchants. Around 400 years ago, merchants in many different countries organized themselves into companies so that they could send larger fleets of ships to the Far East. They hoped for huge profits from these voyages, because spices such as pepper and nutmeg were quite literally worth their weight in gold. GAME REVIEW FROM COUNTER MAGAZINE 3-5 players, 45-60 minutes designed by Dan Glimne and Grzegorz Rejchtman reviewed by Stuart Dagger This game is a reworking of Moderne Zeiten, a game that made its appearance at Essen in 2002 and which I reviewed in Counter 19. Apart from the retheming, they have made two changes. The first is to use tiles to change a fixed board layout to a variable one and the second is a complete rebuild of the scoring system. Both are improvements, and since the original was one of the best games to come out of that year\'s Essen, it won\'t surprise you to hear that I like this one as well. In the original the setting was the 1920s and the game saw you moving along a spiral track. Each space carried the name of one of six cities and a picture of an iconic piece of contemporary technology (aeroplanes, airships, ocean liners, automobiles and the telephone). There was one space on the track for each city/item combination and when you moved to a space it became yours and inaccessible to other players. To indicate your ownership you placed a large ``company tile\'\' on the space and a smaller one on the corresponding space on a grid where the rows were the cities and the columns the technologies. The scoring at the end was then a ``majorities\'\' affair with points for the leader/leaders in each row and column. That general outline remains the same but the two categories are now national East India companies (Britain, France, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands) and items that were mainstays of the East Asian trade (tea, cotton, porcelain, silk, ginger, pepper and nutmeg). Also, instead of placing tiles to indicate ownership, you pick them up. The spaces on the track no longer show pre-printed combinations. Instead they are blank and the combinations are on a set of tiles. At the start of the game these are sorted by company. Each group is then shuffled and stacked. You then take one tile from each stack, shuffle them again and place them face down on the first five spaces of the track. Repeat this with one more tile from each stack and the next five spaces. And so on. This sounds a bit of a performance, but the company scoring is no longer done by majorities and for it to work properly you want a fairly even spread by company along the track. This achieves it. Once the tiles are laid, the first ten are turned face up; the others will be exposed in blocks of five as the game proceeds, so you can see far enough ahead to plan your next move but not enough to be able to plot your way to the finish. The movement rules are unchanged and centre round a deck of cards, each of which shows the flag of one of the companies. At the start of each round the current Start Player rolls a standard die, notes the number and deals out this many cards from the deck, placing them face up. The collection is then auctioned off. Each player has begun the game with 15 ``bills of exchange\'\' and together these are the total amount of ``money\'\' in the game. The winner of each auction takes the cards and distributes the amount paid as evenly as possible among the other players. It\'s a mechanism that Moderne Zeiten took from Reiner Knizia\'s Traumfabrik and it is retained here as a neat way of incorporating an auction procedure into a game where players don\'t have incomes. On your turn you have a choice of either drawing 2 cards from the deck or playing cards from your hand. Played cards go on to the table in front of you, where they join those you have played in previous rounds. You can only take this ``play cards\'\' option if after playing your cards you have the sole lead in at least one of the companies. Sole leadership in a company gives you its ``Directorship\'\' token. Having played your cards, you can then move your marker forwards along the track to the next tile of one of the companies for which you own the Directorship. If you have more than one Directorship, you have a choice of tiles but only move to one of them - no skipping along through several. Having completed your move you pick up the tile and add it to your collection. You also place one of your ``goods markers\'\' in the area of the board set aside for that commodity. These commodity areas will be scored in similar fashion to the ``city rows\'\' of the grid in Moderne Zeiten. At the end of the game there will be a number of goods markers in each and the leader or leaders will score points in each case. However, this time the numbers have been better chosen. In the earlier game the points for sole leadership ranged from 6 for New York down to 1 for New Orleans, and in all cases a joint leadership was worth 1. Here it ranges from 10 to 15 for a sole leadership with half points for a shared one and so it is no longer a case of one or two prizes being so much better than the rest. The scoring for the companies is, as already noted, no longer done by majorities. Instead the designers have turned to that other well-used concept, sets. A set in this case is a collection of tiles consisting of at most one tile from each of the five companies. If you have taken the ``play cards\'\' option, then as a finishing extra in your turn you can cash in a set for victory points. You can cash in at most one set in a turn and sets still in your possession at the end of the game are worthless, so there are issues of timing and risk to be sorted out here. A set can consist of 1 to 5 cards and its value follows that now somewhat overused sequence 1, 3, 6, 10, 15. (Note to designers: Mathematics can offer you a whole heap of non-linear sequences; it\'s not imperative that you always use this triangular one. For example, why not take the Fibonacci sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ..., {where each term is the sum of its two predecessors}, slice off one or more terms from the beginning and use what remains?) The most original, and also the most amusing, mechanism in Moderne Zeiten was the ``stock market\'\' crash which happens several times during the game and ensures that a player can never get a lock on a Directorship. This has been retained, though now it is a ``pirate raid\'\' rather than a share collapse. A scale on the board enables you to keep track of the cards that are currently on the table, both the total number and the number for each company. When the total number hits a certain point, all tabled cards for the company or companies that have the most cards tabled are discarded. This keeps the ownership fluid and also gives players lots of scope for hostile manoeuvering, for when you play cards there is nothing to stop you playing some for companies that you don\'t control but which you\'d like to see heading for a crash. The game ends when someone reaches the special ``multi-company\'\' space at the end of the track. At that point the current round is played to a completion and a few bonus points are handed out for things like ``most money\'\', being the player who reached that final space, and so on. The relationship between Batavia and Moderne Zeiten is very similar to that between Alan Moon\'s Union Pacific and his earlier game Airlines. Union Pacific was very clearly Airlines II. The core of the game was the same, all the best bits were retained, but some of the parts that the designer was less happy with had been rethought. And just to make the potential purchaser feel a little better there was a slight change of theme. It worked there, making a good game even better and the same has happened here. Much as I like the Art Deco graphics in Moderne Zeiten, I think that with my group it will suffer the same fate as did Airlines, never to be played again now that we have the upgrade.

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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Rio Grande Games | Batavia

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