Shannon Appelcline: The Good & The Bad of Tobago

My articles often arise from my gaming experience. Usually, ideas arise from individual games, but once I’ve got a topic I then try and generalize it, so I can talk about a commonality among many games. But every once in a while, some thing stands out originally enough that I really only have one game to talk about, and that’s the case this week.

So, though it may look like I’m picking on Tobago this week, that’s in part because it’s doing some neat and new stuff--even if I don’t like the final form that it took.

All About Tobago

Tobago was a game released in 2009 by Rio Grande. It’s by new-comer designer, Bruce Allen. I think the first thing that caught peoples’ eyes after the release was the entirely gorgeous components. It looked like Settlers on speed, with a hex-oriented board set up as puzzle cuts that could be used to create several different playing scenarios. Three-dimensional Easter Island like heads and palm trees just added to the experience.

However, when the first reports on the game came out, it was obvious that there was more to it than just bits. You see, Tobago is a weird variant of a deduction game, where you actually create the answers to a puzzle (of where a treasure is located) by slowing decreasing the set of places where said treasure could be located.

It’s all done with cards. In Tobago you have an island made up of a variety of terrain: forests, jungles, water, beaches, etc. The cards interact with that. When you play a card, you’re defining where a treasure is, with something like “on a beach”, “within one space of a mountain”, “within two spaces of the largest jungle”, etc. As you start adding more of these sets to a single treasure, their intersection increasingly confines where that treasure is located. It’s simple set theory, but i think it’s brilliantly applied to gaming in Tobago.

Here’s my problem: it doesn’t make any real difference. I’d estimate that 80% of the time in Tobago is spent carefully studying cards and figuring out how they might constrain the locations of various treasures. Players turn cards this way and that, working through their entire hand to figure out how each one adjusts the set of each and every treasure on the board. You can do this off-turn, but invariably (in my plays), there’s a lot of sitting around as the active player says, “If I said that treasure was next to a hut, it’d mean it could be in this space or that one, oh wait not that one, and in that over there, oh and that over there too. Oh, that doesn’t work ...”

Now that’d be cool, I think, if clever manipulation of set theory won you a game of Tobago, but it doesn’t. I do believe that you can gain some small advantage in the game sometimes by locating treasures that only you can quickly get to. I also think you can get a slightly bigger advantage by adjusting sets to make sure that treasures you’ve contributed to are the ones found by the end of the game.

But, I think all of that pales in the face of the other element of the game. After a treasure is discovered, it’s split up between everyone who contributed to its location. There’s then a little subphase that’s part bluffing and part risk-reward management where each player sees some of the treasure, then everything’s shuffled up and the participating players decide how to split it. Given that you could get value “2” treasure as a result or a value “6” treasure--or even lose out on your biggest treasure--there’s much more variance in this section of the game than in the actual treasure location.

Having seen the game played, I’d be hard set to say that any player got one treasure more or less from the treasure location, whereas I could easily say that some players got twice as much treasure as others from the treasure splitting. And that’s my problem with the game: it’s got a great mechanism that takes quite a bit of thought and it makes almost no difference in the game. Sadly, after playing Tobago twice, I came to the conclusion that it was largely a waste of time.

Mind you, I speak of it as a (somewhat) strategic game player. On the other hand, given that it was manufactured by Zoch, I could easily believe that it was intended as a family game. If you didn’t think much about the placement of the treasure, it could be sort of delightful, seeing how the treasure locations became slowly clear, almost magically. But I don’t know how to turn off my brain like that (and I’ll generally refer you to my article on games that require that you Don’t Think About It Too Much).

For myself, I simply mark down another game design rule: if you create a thoughtful mechanism, make sure it’s strategic too.

Around the Corner

It’s been a bit since I wrote here, so I refer you to my recent reviews on Claustrophobia and World Without End. Meanwhile, for those of you interested in my recent release of Reiner Knizia’s Moneyfor the iPhone, I’d invite you to join a new mailing list that I set called Mobile Euro Games. You’ll be able to get info on updates and upcoming programs. I’ve now started serious work on Reiner Knizia’s High Society with hope of completing a first-cut prototype this month (using the card game engine created for Money).

In the meantime, I’ll see you back here in a couple weeks.

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