A Tale of Two MeeplesMarco! Polo!
No, we're not talking about the classic swimming pool game, instead we're talking about The Voyages of Marco Polo, the board game. We'd highly recommend not mixing them up unless you like your Euro games wet!
It's a dice placement game about tracing the journey that was made from Venice to China. You travel the world by river or overland, setting up trading posts in each place you stop which get you permanent benefits or new action spaces to use.
Points come from gathering goods, completing contracts, setting up outposts and visiting certain cities - it's a real point salad with lots of paths to victory.
Our favourite part was the way you can get ongoing benefits by setting up shop in the various locations. Some gave us more flexibility when it came time to place our dice, while others just gave us income at the start of each round which was handy as well.
Many spaces require a certain number of dice to trigger them, then the values determine the reward you get. The lowest face is the one that counts, so we found taking the action at the higher strengths could be quite costly.
At two players you block off a couple of the low cost spaces, making them more even for both players, but otherwise it plays the same as normal. Because travelling is so expensive, not having other players on the map didn't feel like it was a problem and it still felt tight.
The game did feel quite short, with not enough time to do everything we wanted, but that might change as you get more familiar with it. It's always tough in a convention setting to get a real idea of how a game plays, but we liked what we saw and are keen to try the revamped sequel version which is meant to add a bit more depth to the game.
#boardgames
No, we're not talking about the classic swimming pool game, instead we're talking about The Voyages of Marco Polo, the board game. We'd highly recommend not mixing them up unless you like your Euro games wet!
It's a dice placement game about tracing the journey that was made from Venice to China. You travel the world by river or overland, setting up trading posts in each place you stop which get you permanent benefits or new action spaces to use.
Points come from gathering goods, completing contracts, setting up outposts and visiting certain cities - it's a real point salad with lots of paths to victory.
Our favourite part was the way you can get ongoing benefits by setting up shop in the various locations. Some gave us more flexibility when it came time to place our dice, while others just gave us income at the start of each round which was handy as well.
Many spaces require a certain number of dice to trigger them, then the values determine the reward you get. The lowest face is the one that counts, so we found taking the action at the higher strengths could be quite costly.
At two players you block off a couple of the low cost spaces, making them more even for both players, but otherwise it plays the same as normal. Because travelling is so expensive, not having other players on the map didn't feel like it was a problem and it still felt tight.
The game did feel quite short, with not enough time to do everything we wanted, but that might change as you get more familiar with it. It's always tough in a convention setting to get a real idea of how a game plays, but we liked what we saw and are keen to try the revamped sequel version which is meant to add a bit more depth to the game.
#boardgames
Jerk