And it’s Emily by a nose

Kate, Gili, Emily, Eitan, Nadine

Lecardo

Kate 138, Nadine 135

Kate’s husband Moshe received this to review; we played while waiting for the others. The cards are nice and it’s fun to make word combinations. You place as many of your 7 cards as you can on your turn, with points adding up with each adjacent card. You’re supposed to make two word common phrases, but what qualifies can be subjective. For example, ‘head’ followed by ‘table’ clearly works, while ‘land’ ‘case’ isn’t clear. We think there could be a more interesting and strategic game with the cards, maybe with hand management and some planning, which there isn’t now. And it’s a lot of adding for the scoring.

Navegador

Emily 97, Eitan 96, Nadine 84, Gili 80, Kate 78

I’ve played this twice, Gili once, first play for the others. At the end of the game we scored our boards one at a time, Eitan’s first and then Emily’s, when she overtook him by one. Everyone enjoyed the game and the different possible strategies. We spent time at the beginning going over how to play, so people had a pretty good understanding. Eitan concentrated on colonies, he had around 10, and he had factories. Emily had 9 factories, Kate had blue chips and brown buildings, I had 5 gray buildings, and Gili sailed a lot and had 5 blue chips. I did terribly with money, most of the game Emily and Eitan were getting twice as much money in the market. I missed being able to afford a colony once, the same thing happened to Gili. I didn’t buy ships and had only one blue chip, everyone else had at least two.

We didn’t like the market mechanic. It’s fine to have it relate strategically to which colonies and factories you get, but the calculations are really tedious. Eitan worked hard figuring out the best deals for people seated away from the market, but it takes a lot of time, holding up the game for not that much differentiation. There should be a simpler way to achieve the slight interaction which doesn’t even affect whether people go to the market that much, they go if they need money. We want to play again now that we understand the game.