Game Preview: Vasco da Gama

by Paolo Mori and Andrea “Liga” Ligabue
October 2, 2009

Designers: Paolo Mori
Publisher: What’s Your Game? / Rio Grande Games

Players: 2-4
Ages: 12+
Playing time: 90 minutes
Release date: October 2009
Languages: English & Italian (with German, French & Dutch as downloads)
Price: €35 (€30 preorder)
Links:

This is an unconventional preview as it was written with four hands (and hopefully almost two brains) as I was helped by designer Paolo Mori, whose first published design, UR was also released by What’s Your Game. During this preview, I’ll keep my words italicized so that gamers who want to overlook my usual rambling speech can hop to the material that might be more appealing to them. Paolo is a probing gamer and will try to explain the main elements of the game in an objective way so that you can make up your own mind about the game.

As each turn consists of a planning phase, an action resolution phase, and a navigation phase, I think that the best way to explain the game is to give an overview of each of these moments of the game, starting with…

The Planning Phase

Planning is the core of the game, and it relies on the mechanism that the entire game was built around. In brief, twenty actions tokens – numbered 1-20 – are available on the board. In clockwise order, players take one of these tokens and place it, together with a token of their own color, on an action area of the board, setting up that action for that particular moment during the action resolution phase. For example, if I take the “16” token and place it in the Court, I’m stating that I want to perform a Court action – whether it’s taking gold or exploiting the power of a special character – during the 16th part of that turn.

Placing a lower number on a specific area gives a player an early action and grants him access to better choices in that area – more gold, better projects, more sailors, and so on – so why wouldn’t a player start with #1, followed by #2, etc.? Simple – because such planning would sometimes prove to be very risky. At the start of the planning phase a “Vasco da Gama” tile is revealed showing a number from 4 to 12. This number will be adjusted after the planning phase, that is, after all players have placed their four action tokens, by a modifier ranging from -3 to +3. This final number represents the first action that can be performed for no charge, while all lower-numbered actions will cost gold to play them, with the cost being the difference between the number on the token and the number stated by Vasco da Gama.

This is the planning phase, a sort of “worker placement” with a quite strong “risk management” twist: How much can you afford to pay to go first?

I find this part of the game really intriguing as it’s a nice revisitation of the classic worker placement. Thanks to the randomness in the revelation of the Vasco da Gama tile, this system seems to be quite safe from the problem of analysis-paralysis, and thanks to what’s involved in considering the details of the mechanism, a lot of indirect interaction occurs between the players, who are trying to do a lot of planning.

After a bit of brain-burn in the planning phase, the action phase usually runs quite smoothly: Actions are called out according to their number, from lowest to highest, and the players decide (when they have to pay) whether they want to pay for these actions and if so, how to use them. The actions are in four areas of the board:

• In the Court you get gold – with the amount depending on when you get there – or special characters that allow you to tweak the rules in some way, such as placing a special ship, getting an additional action, or getting sailors or victory points.

• In the Shipyard you buy projects for your ships. Ships have different values (4 to 11) and a number of different sailors (1 to 5) that are needed to set sail. You can also buy a single already-equipped ship; you pay more but save on sailors.

• In the Workshops you recruit sailors, paying them according to the number of different sailor colors that you buy. (If five sailors of the same color are available, for example, you pay only 1 gold to recruit them all.) Together with sailors, you can recruit a captain for your ship, which is required for a ship to sail.

• In the Haven you can set sail with your ships as long as they have sailors and captains. When you sail, you place your ships on the eligible slots of a single landing, earning you victory points according to the value depicted on the slot and some kind of resource, depending on the chosen landing.

The Navigation Phase

When all of the action tokens have been called out and resolved, the action phase comes to an end and the navigation map is checked once again. If any landings have been filled with ships, these score additional victory points and advance to the following landing, if there are slots available.

This navigation mechanism requires careful placement as you don’t want to see your expensive ship dismissed after a single scoring because there are no free slots to occupy when the ship must advance. This phase is also another place where you can decide to screw your opponents, dooming their beloved ships.

I’m agree with the designer: The effect of this part of the rules creates quite good interaction, and you can really hit your oppenents hard.

To summarize, Vasco da Gama is a 2-4 player game with a ten minute rules explanation and twenty minutes of playtime for each player, with a strong planning element and a small but critical risk management factor that’s not inclined to forgive players for repeated errors during the game. If you are interested by this sort of game, you can try it out at Spiel. Hope to meet you there!

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