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

GOA

Price: £24.99

Out of Stock

Board game, 3-4 players, ages 12+, by Rio Grande At the beginning of the 16th century: beautiful beaches, wonderful climate, and one of the most important trading cities in the world. Competing companies trade with spices and send their colonists into the world and invest their money. Of most importance is how you manage your spices to grow a successful company: should you build more effective ships? Build more effective plantations? Attract more colonists? The best strategy is the one that creates the most successful business. Goa: wealth and glory, but not without risk! ********** 2-4 players, 90 minutes designed by Rüdiger Dorn reviewed by Stuart Dagger Goa (capital: Bituva) is a coastal region of India that was seized by the Portugese in 1510 and which they did not leave until 1961, when the Indian Government finally decided that enough was enough and kicked them out. Their reason for establishing the colony in the first place lay with the highly lucrative spice trade and it is this that forms the background for the game. Goa belongs to the same general family as Die Fürsten von Florenz and Puerto Rico in that you are given a ``garden\'\' and score points according to how well you cultivate it. As with those other two games, ``cultivation\'\' means buying point producing items in a situation where supply is limited and money is scarce, and placing them on to your own little patch. It is a type of game that I tend to like and so it shouldn\'t come as too much of a surprise for you to learn that I like this one too. Each player has two small boards. One has spaces for your plantations and colonies - up to four of each. The other, which is known as your ``Development Chart\'\', has five columns on which you mark your progress in various areas of benefit to your economy. Once you have got them established, both the plantations and the colonies produce spices. The plantations are easier to acquire and tend to be more productive, but each only produces one of the five types of spice and you need all five types if you are to make good progress on your other board. Colonies are a bit harder to acquire, but they are more flexible in what they produce and they are worth victory points at the end. To do well you need both, and preferably a full set of both. The columns on the other small board correspond to items that are either essential or highly desirable: ships, spice, money, colonists and expedition cards. Each of these are things that you can either collect or call upon in your turn and the general principle is that the further you have advanced in the appropriate column, the more you receive. For example, if you build ships as one of the actions in your turn, you receive 1 ship if your marker is still in the starting position of the ship column, but 3 if it has advanced to row 3. Advancing along the columns also brings in victory points. There are five rows in each column and the VP scale for advances, like that for the number of colonies, goes 1-3-6-10. In terms of the resources you need to expend, the rows are progessively harder to reach and there simply isn\'t enough time in the game to get to the end of all of them. So you need to make choices and plan ahead. In addition to these player boards, there is also a large communal one. This has spaces for various card decks and occupying its centre is a big 5x5 grid. On this go the tiles which the players will have the opportunity of buying. These feature a variety of stuff. The plantations are in there, but so also are tiles that will give you extra ships, extra colonists, endgame victory points and so on. There are two sets of such tiles, the As and the Bs. At the start of the game, 25 of the A-tiles are laid out and these remain available for four rounds, at the end of which those not taken are removed and the grid is refilled with the B-tiles. Four rounds after that and the game is over. Each round starts with a tile auction and before the bidding gets under way, there is a tactical preliminary in which players determine what will be up for sale this round. The Start Player will be in possession of a ``flag\'\' and places this orthogonally adjacent to a tile of the grid. The next player then puts a marker on a tile that is orthogonally or diagonally adjacent to the flag. Player 3 does the same, but this time adjacent to the tile chosen by the previous player. And so on, finishing with the choice of a tile by the Start Player. Now the selling starts, beginning with the sale of the flag. The Start Player auctions this off and then each player does the same with the tiles they have marked. Auctions are ``once round\'\', ending with the player who is conducting the auction. If the auctioneer wins, the money goes to the bank; if anybody else does, the money goes to the auctioneer. The winner of the auction for the flag gets not only it but a card entitling them to take an extra action in their turn. That might not sound much in comparison with a tile, but in a game where you don\'t have time to do everything you would like, extra actions are valuable. Remember too that as owner of the flag you get to sell it on the next turn and so the money you have paid out this turn will probably come back to you next. Auctions over, each player now gets to take three actions (plus any extra to which they are entitled by virtue of cards they have acquired). The menu: 1. Build ships 2. Tax 3. Take Expedition Cards 4. Harvest 5. Advance on the Development Chart 6. Found a Colony The first three of these are straightforward - you just take the ships, money, Expedition Cards to which you are entitled. As noted earlier, how many or how much this is will depend on how far you have advanced in the appropriate column of your Development Chart. Expedition Cards can be used in one of two ways. The top half of the card shows what you get if you play them as part of your turn. It will either be a present from the bank in terms of money, ships, spice tokens or colonists; a reduction in the cost of some action such as an advance on your Development Chart; or an entitlement to raise cash by selling surplus spice. The alternative is to save them until the end, when they will be worth victory points. The system here is that the lower part of each card carries one of 5 symbols and the big points come from matching sets. It is the sort of system that could get out of hand and dominate a game, but doesn\'t in this instance because of the low and strictly applied hand limits. Harvest is a matter of acquiring new spice tokens to replace ones you have used. When you first buy a plantation or found a colony, it comes fully loaded with spice. This will be 1-3 tokens in the case of a plantation and 1-2 in the case of a colony. Once you have used these initial ones, the only way to replenish is via this action. As with ships etc, how many tokens the action will bring you is determined by the position on your chart. However, this time there is an extra restriction in that each plantation and colony has a storage capacity and you can\'t take more tokens than you have available spaces. Advancing on your Development Chart requires ships and spice. For the first step in each column you have to surrender one of each, then two of each, three of each and finally four of each. Moreover, it is not a case of ``any spice token will do\'\'. A specific combination, which varies from column to column, is required for each step and this is something you have to bear in mind when planning your strategy and your purchases. Founding a colony requires colonists and if you look back to the action menu, you will note that ``acquire colonists\'\' isn\'t on it. There do exist colonist cards, but you can\'t just say ``I\'ll have some, please\'\'. Instead you get them by either buying a tile or drawing an Expedition Card that offers them. Having got some, you treasure them, because they provide your safety margin in what is a multi-step procedure. The four colonies you can build require 6, 8, 10 or 12 colonists and over the course of the game you can build at most one of each type. When you choose this action, you begin by declaring which of the four you are going to try for. Then you turn over two Expedition Cards. I have already described two of the features of such a card, but there is a third in the form of a ``colonist rating\'\'. This is in the range 1 to 3, with all three numbers being equally likely. Add these two ratings together. Then look at the colonist column on your Development Chart. If your marker is still on its starting square, this will register a zero, but if you have advanced it, it will show either 2, 3, 4 or 6. Add these colonists to the previous total. If you have now met your target, the colony is founded. If not, you can use colonist cards from your hand to make up the difference. If you can\'t do this, the attempt fails and all you get is a colonist card by way of compensation. In the early part of the game you will want colonies to supply the types of spice you aren\'t getting from your plantations and later you will be concerned with the end of game victory points. The 4 points you would lose because you haven\'t built the fourth colony could well prove fatal to your chances of winning and so making sure you get the ``12\'\' before the game ends is important. The most common comparison that people have been making for Goa is with Die Fürsten von Florenz and as a guide to whether or not it is a game you will like, I think this is helpful. The themes are different and, apart from the fact that both games involve buying tiles at auction, there is little similarity with the mechanics, but when it comes to feel and to level of interaction the comparison stands up. In both games you have your own private little patch and are trying to assemble a collection of items that will form an efficient points producing machine, and in both the interaction is limited to the auctions. Also contributing to the similarity of feel is the fact that in both games you are always conscious of not having enough time to do all the things you\'d like. These are somewhat nebulous points and so the comparison shouldn\'t be pushed too far, but if you enjoyed the earlier game, I think there is a good chance you will also enjoy this one. I did and do. I have played the game with both four players and with three. Four is better, but three is still good. I haven\'t tried it, but I think that the 2-player game would lose a lot. A 2-player auction game?

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

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