Scoring for Santa Maria can be tough to wrap your head around. There are three years, there are various resources, there’s shipping routes and religious appointments and happiness tokens. When you draw last blue die, the board freezes and you add it all up. A lot of people have a gut feeling about who won … Read more

Your ship’s built, your crew’s engaged, provisions are loaded in the hold, now do you go raid? Will it pay off in points for you to mount up? That’s where Raiders of the North Sea create a slight tension as you weigh near term treasure versus building toward longer game. Do you bump your Valkyrie … Read more

In Marco Polo II, Round Six is the last round and it is more about counting than strategy. You’ve been shuffling your trader around the Silk Road for five rounds now building up trading posts, stockpiling goods, juggling dice pools. And finally you get to the end… but then the board falls silent. There’s nothing … Read more

In Coimbra, most games do not end with huge sweeping plays. In fact, they ends in small margins; the kind where a single coin or a single guard token makes all the difference between first and second place. After several hours of coordinating three separate action tracks, it’s easy to forget such small numbers. So … Read more

And then, click, the last action card is played. And it’s over. At that point, the game changes into something else. The tile laying strategy come to an end. The busy resource management stop. You’re faced with a board littered with achievements, strewn across table. There are tokens and half-finished tracks. They appear less like … Read more

The final minutes of a Hadara game often feel like your economy collapsing. Three eras of colonizing, statue-carving, and increasing influence have come down to this: who has the most points? Calculating it out is complicated, so doing it in your head usually result in a mistake. Gold sets, silver medals, and color bonuses all … Read more

Ginkgopolis eventually hits a point where the supply of tiles depletes and the game changes. Instead of a puzzle about space placement, it becomes an exercise in bookkeeping. You can place your buildings and trade away all day long, but winning will require understanding what’s beneath those physical pieces: How many points do they represent? … Read more