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Bobby Warren
United States
Glendale
Arizona
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I was asked about London and Navegador so here are some of my thoughts on them. I am not trying to do complete overviews or reviews, just highlight some of the things I like about the games while adding a few comments.
London is a card-driven game about rebuilding the city after the great fire started by The Doctor while fighting the Terileptils and preventing their modified strain of the plague from wiping out the population of Earth.
Okay, so the Doctor part isn't true. Or maybe it is?
I really like this game. London has some similarities to Race for the Galaxy in that the players are building their parts of the city using cards which act as both a form of currency and the infrastructure of the city. When a player plays a card onto their Building Display they have to "discard" a card of the same color (type) to a space in City Display and pay any required monetary costs. There are two rows in the City Display and cards are added first to any space on the top row, then to the bottom row. The number of spaces in each row is determined by the number of players.
When it is time to draw cards, players may draw blind from the deck, or draw a face-up card from the City Display. If the City Display is full and a card is supposed to be added to it, the top row gets permanently discarded and the bottom row is moved up to the top row.
This mechanic means that any card someone chooses not to build, or is forced to use to build another card, is placed in a supply that others may draw. It keeps cards in play and can prevent a player which gets an extremely lucky draw from just discarding the cards from the game.
Building one or more cards into the Building display is one thing which can be done on a turn. The others are buying land in the city by paying the cost and placing an ownership marker on the board, drawing cards, or a player can run their City Display.
Running the City Display usually rewards the player with money, victory points, or reducing their poverty, which is a form of negative currency. After the running the city, the player collects more poverty equal to the number of piles in their City Display plus the cards in-hand, minus the number of districts that player has built on the board. Yes, that means the poverty levels increase when a player runs their city and this is the case until later in the game.
Most building cards are flipped over to indicate they have been used. Some of them have requirements to use, such as paying money or discarding a card. When building onto their City Display, a player can either add a new pile or play the card on top of one of the existing piles.
At the end of the game, some of the cards in the display are worth victory points while some of the cards would have to have been activated while the city was run to generate VPs.
The player with the least poverty discards all their poverty points and the other players then discard the say number of points and reduce their final score by a number of points determined by how much poverty they have left.
I've played six times and like the game best with three. There are multiple ways to approach the game: (mostly) ignore poverty and go all-out for score; focus on building spots on the board, or work on being efficient and keeping poverty low are just some of the options. While typing this up I even thought of another angle I would like to try out the next time I play.
One caveat is a familiarity with the cards and the game do favor the experienced players. Make sure to tell the new players that money is generally harder to generate later in the game, so they should try an build up a reserve.
Navegador is the latest rondel game and it is about Portuguese exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries. I've only played it once with two players, so my knowledge is much more limited on this one.
The rondel is circle that is divided into eight spaces which contains seven possible actions. One of the actions appears twice and those two spaces are on opposite sides of the rondel. Each turn, a player moves their piece clockwise on the rondel up to three spaces for free, or they can pay a large sum to move further. They then take the action of the space they are on the rondel.
Basically, the spaces let you recruit workers, build ships, seeks favor from patrons, build colonies, sails ships, build buildings which make many of the other actions more economical, or sell and/or refine goods from the colonies for the market. The market space is the one that appears twice.
It really seems like there are a lot of rules in the game, but once you get through them it is a fairly simple game with a bunch of little things to do, and not enough time or actions in which to do them. The rules were hard to understand at points and the examples mostly helped, but there was even at least one of those that made things more confusing for a few minutes.
I still have not been compelled to buy any of the rondel games. I came close with Hamburgum, but never did pull the trigger because I just couldn't see getting it played much. Navegador might the first that I do pick up.
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