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Lords of the Spanish Main Price: £14.99 Board Game; 2-8 Players by Sierra Madre Games Each player, representing a historical individual in the year 1600, attempts to make his fortune in the Spanish Main. One player is the Marqués de Guadalcazar, the Spanish governor of Española. He is not averse to dealing in contraband goods with the merchant fleets of the other players. During each yearly turn, a player bids upon properties and slaves, establishes colonies, and maneuvers his ships for either trade or piracy. He is free to perform almost any negotiation or deal with the other players. In 1605, the treasure player (usually the Marqués) sails the first treasure flotilla, using either his own fleet, or a contracted foreign one. If the voyage successfully avoids the pirates of the other players, the treasure is divided up as agreed among the collaborators. The player finishing with the greatest gold and treasure wins. ++++++++++++++++++++ Counter magazine review ++++++++++++++++++++ Sierra Madre Games 2-8 players, 3 hours designed by Phil Eklund reviewed by Stuart Dagger Autumn 1993 saw the arrival of Sumo 13 and with it the news that there were sounds emanating from Sumo Towers that were reminiscent of the restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally. The cause was a game called Lords of the Sierra Madre from the hitherto unknown to us designer/publisher Phil Eklund. Like the lady at the next table in the aforementioned film, I decided straightaway that ``I\'ll have what he had\'\'. Unfortunately, the effect wasn\'t repeated when we tried the game up here - a case, maybe, of dour northerners and a lower ambient temperature. I understood why Mike had been so taken with the game, but it just didn\'t click with us in the way it had with him. Based on this experience I didn\'t try Phil\'s other games, but my interest was reawakened when I saw his name on the lists for Essen back in October and that he would be bringing this new one along. It went on my list of games to look at, but by the time I got round to it on the Friday, the small number of copies he had brought over had all been sold. Mike obviously got there quicker, for as you will recall, he went on to make it his choice as the best game of 2006. Along with the others in the series, it can now be bought in the UK - Leisure Games have it on their list - and so availability is not a problem. Lords of the Spanish Main, like its three predecessors (Lords of the Sierra Madre, of the Renaissance, and of the High Frontier), is a historical simulation game with a fairly strong role-playing element. One player takes the role of the Marqués de Guadalcazar, who is the governor of the colony of Santo Domingo and the man charged with the job of getting South American gold back to Spain. The others are assorted characters of various nationalities, such as Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh and Peter Stuyvesant. They have fleets with which they will trade, raid and perhaps turn to piracy. Over the course of the game players will found colonies, acquire extra characters & fleets and try to get their hands on those Spanish gold shipments. The object, as you would expect, is to become rich. The game is card-driven and begins in 1600 -a bit too late for Drake, but he is such a charismatic individual that the designer felt a bit of stretching was in order. Each round is a ``year\'\' and begins with the turn-over of a double purpose card containing both a local event and either a European event (approx 10% of the time) or an asset (the other 90%). The local event will be bad news for the colonies and units in one area of the board - disease, hurricanes, mutinies and so on. After this has been resolved, the card, if it is an asset, assumes its function as such and is auctioned. These assets are either ships, colonies, native tribes or ``Mordida\'\' cards, of which more later. A colony will require a couple of years of further investment before it starts to show a return; the others are usable immediately. The turn of the card and resolution of the local event is phase one of the round; its auctioning comes in phase three. In between is ``capitalization and skullduggery\'\'. ``Capitalization\'\' is paying for so-called ``immature\'\' colonies and upgrades that are not yet up and running. This might be a colony card that you bought the round before, or a fort or colony improvement that you started but which is not yet complete. The ``skullduggery\'\' is tied to the mordida cards, each of which carries a list of things that you can do and a price list telling you how much it will cost. Many of these options are aimed at making life harder for an opponent, but there are also some beneficial ones that you can do either for your own benefit, or on behalf of another player as part of some deal. When the card for the round is for a European event rather than an asset, there is no phase three auction. Instead you check out the Caribbean consequences of the stone that has landed in European waters. Some events are good - for some players at least - and see increased prices for certain commodities being produced in the colonies; others are bad and will see players losing assets. Each player character has both a nationality and a religion. So Francis Drake, for example, is English and Protestant. One or both of these attributes is also possessed by many of the asset cards. In normal circumstances there is nothing to stop me, as Francis Drake, acquiring an asset which is either non-English or Catholic. When the world is at peace, tribal loyalties don\'t stand in the way of cooperation. However, if the wrong war breaks out, I am liable to lose erstwhile friends. In the case of a religious conflict such as the Thirty Years War, the result would be the loss of all Catholic cards owned by Protestants and vice versa. In the terminology of the game, the cards would be ``disrupted\'\'. In some circumstances disrupted cards go out of the game; in others they go mercenary and are again up for auction. There is also an event - the appearance of a comet - that disrupts all the mordida cards, one likely consequence of which is a change of control of the Spanish treasure fleet. In phase four the players take their actions. First they decide whether each of their fleets is going to be a merchantman or a pirate, and if the latter, they decide, secretly, where it will be based. Then they can either hire or disband soldiers. That settled, their various units can either raid or trade. Trading follows a formal set of rules. The ship doing the trading decides on a route which will take him through the region before heading back to Europe. In each area he goes through he can attempt to trade with any of the colonies there. Each fleet and each colony has a ``capacity\'\' in the range 1 to 3, and for a trade to be possible both must have ``space in the hold\'\'. If they do, and if both sides wish to trade, then each gains 1 gold and reduces their spare capacity by 1. If a merchantman passes through an area where a privateer is located, the latter can intercept, which will result in either a battle or a ransom. Sea battles are dice-free affairs in which each side has a card that enables them to adopt one of four tactics (seize the weather vane, broadside, boarding or flee) and the two choices are then cross-referenced to give a result. This continues until the battle is resolved or one side makes its escape. Raids can be carried out against colonies by either ships containing soldiers or by native tribes. As with the sea battles, the defender can either pay a ransom or challenge the raider to go through with the attack. The fights are again dice-free, but this time it is a simpler affair with both sides removing soldiers until one or both have none left. The other happening that drives events is the once per decade sailing of the Spanish treasure fleet. This can carry up to 4 ``treasure tents\'\', each of which is worth a massive 25 victory points. The rules for it are are similar to those for the merchantmen: it must have enough capacity and it must follow a route through the Caribbean picking up gold from various places before setting sail for Europe. Unless the player in charge has done deals, attacks on the fleet are pretty much inevitable. At the end of the game it is a matter of adding the VP from treasure fleets to gold in hand (1VP per gold piece), and so how the players handle the events surrounding these sailings is likely to be critical. The game can be played to a time limit, but the recommended ending is that the game should end with the first round after the 25th that sees the drawing of a European event card. On average that means roughly 30 turns. How long that will take is going to depend on how briskly the players move things along, but the 3 hour estimate given by the designer seems fair. The strength and attraction of this game lie in the wealth of historical detail that the designer has provided, and whether or not you enjoy it is going to depend to a large extent on the degree to which you are sucked in to this aspect of things. It will also be necessary for the players to supply a fair amount of the script for themselves. This is not like a typical Eurogame, where the strategies and tactics are built in and the players just have to navigate their way through as best they can. Here you are given a wonderfully detailed backdrop and some basic and fairly rigid rules governing raiding and trading, but unless your group consists of well-matched and imaginative deal makers, those 30 rounds are going to seem flat and repetitive. This is most definitely not a game for everybody, but what the designer set out to do he has done well, and for the right players, it is going to be every bit as enjoyable as Mike says. For my part, when it comes to games of this length I\'ll stick to the likes of 18xx, Funkenschlag, Indonesia and Die Macher. The components are a throwback to the home-brew wargames of the 1980s. You get a large polygrip bag containing a full colour map printed on card, paper ``boards\'\' for each player with a summary of important information and space to organize your holdings, cards that require scissors work and some small cut out pieces to record colony ownership on the map. You will also need a supply of coins but must supply those for yourself. The other games in the series follow the same general pattern of a detailed historical setting in which the players then have to supply the story line. However, they are bigger and take longer to play, and so if you find the idea of this sort of game appealing and want to dip your toe in the water, this is the one you should try first. More ...

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