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Kris Hall: Salamanca
This week the Appalachian Gamers played a couple of games that were new to me, and the one that impressed me the most was Salamanca, a tile-laying game designed by Stefan Dorra. I’m not a big fan of tile-laying games, but Salamanca was simple enough, quick enough, and intelligent enough for me to feel that it was a decent hour-long filler game.
There is no English-language edition of the game yet, but none of the components have text on them so an English copy of the rules is all you need.
In Salamanca, players take the roles of leaders in medieval Spain. They place tiles on the board in such a way as to create chains of landscape tiles that connect to castles, farms, and monasteries that they control. Players have three squire tokens that they may use to mark their control of building tiles when these tiles are placed. When players think that their building and its surrounding landscape tiles have reached maximum scoring potential, they may score their holdings, remove the squire token from the appropriate building, and collect cash (the victory points of this game).
Players may also sometimes take various special actions, such as placing nuisance tokens (such as rats or locusts) on the tiles of their opponents in an attempt to reduce their score.
At the beginning of the game players are dealt a hand of cards. In our four-player game, each player got four cards. These cards are marked with numbers ranging from one to ten (not all are used in a game with less than five players). The cards with numbers less than six also have an image which denotes a special action associated with that card.
Each round, each player will in turn play one of his cards to the table. The player with the highest numbered card will go first, and he may take his pick of the tiles that are available that turn (the number of tiles available equals the number of players in the game). The player with the next highest card plays second, and so on. The player with the lowest card may take the special action associated with his card as well as claim a tile.
When placing a building tile, a player will add his squire token to mark his ownership. Each of the three building types has a series of color-coded tiles associated with it that will increase the value of the building when placed adjacent to it, or in a chain of appropriate tiles that connects to the building. For example, pasture and fields create value for farms, but vineyards create value for monasteries. Some landscape tiles are especially fertile and are worth extra points. More than one player may have buildings connecting to an appropriate series of landscape tiles. You may place a high-scoring tile next to your castle only to see an opponent plop his castle on the other side of the high-scoring tile.
After the round is completed, players each pass the card they played to the player on their left. This keeps all the cards in the game, and serves as a balancing mechanism. Charlie may go first this turn because he has the valuable “8” card, but if I am to Charlie’s left, his card will mine to use on the next turn.
One rule with important implications for tactics is that the special high-scoring fertile tiles are removed from the board once a player uses them to score. I heard this rule during the rules explanation at the beginning of the game, but how important this rule would be didn’t sink in. In one early turn, both Charlie and Ted had farms that connected to holdings that I considered to be mine. But Ted and Charlie scored their buildings in rapid succession, and two valuable high-scoring tiles were removed from the spaces adjacent to my farm. This not only reduced the scoring that I hoped to do, but it broke a chain of tiles leading away from my farm. It would take a while before I could fix the break in the chain and sell my own holdings.
Players also have a conde token that they may place on an opponent’s building. The conde is a freeloader who collects points for his owner when the opponent scores his holdings. Once a building is scored, the conde is removed along with the squire, and the these tokens are free to be used again by their owners. In our game, Ted placed his conde on my building, but I refused to score that building until the end of the game. This trapped Ted’s conde in place, and reduced the number of times he could use it.
None of the mechanisms in the game struck as particularly innovative, but that didn’t stop me from having fun, or getting frustrated when other players proved to be better at creating huge holdings than I was.
Salamanca is light and quick without being brainless, and I won’t object to playing it again. This may sound like I am damning it with faint praise, but for a tile game that is high praise indeed from me.
Posted by Kris Hall on May 16, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists, Kris Hall / 779
Comments:
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I grabbed this last year in a math trade and have played it a few times. Very enjoyable, especially with 5 players, it’s very tight. There’s a little bit of hose-your-neighbor, but all in good fun. I encourage people to give it a try if they have the opportunity. Posted by Joe Casadonte on May 16, 2008 at 08:06 AM | #
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