Robert Rossney
United States
San Francisco
California
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Kontor is an outstanding game and one that deserves more attention than it's gotten.
The game ostensibly is set in 16th-century Amsterdam, and there is some flummery in the rules about canals, docks, and commodities, but at bottom it's an abstract two-player tile-placing game. It is, however, an extremely good example of the genre, with a good mix of skill and luck and some extremely clever mechanisms.
The core mechanism of the game is that each of the 90 or so cards in the game has a unique number on it. Each turn, the players choose a card from their hand and reveal them simultaneously, and the higher-numbered card is placed into the layout (a grid that grows until it fits inside a 7x7 square) first.
Cards are either water cards or dock cards. Dock cards form scoring regions, and water cards separate the docks from one another. Each dock card belongs to one of the players, and contributes a certain number of warehouses to the scoring region. There are three colors of warehouse, and a player scores a region (for which one victory point is awarded) by having the greatest majority of warehouses in one color. Ties are broken using a circular rock-paper-scissors ranking of the colors, so that having two more brown warehouses than your opponent will win you the region if he has two more green ones than you do, but not if he has two more white ones than you do.
Further complicating matters are the coin and ship symbols on some cards. If you play a card that has a coin on it, your opponent must pay a coin (you start with four) to the bank before he plays his card; if he can't, he takes his card back into his hand. The only way to get new coins is to play water cards. Which means that if your opponent has been able to aggressively play coin cards, you'll be forced into a position where you need to play water cards instead of advancing your position with dock cards.
But this isn't quite as simple as it seems. At the end of the game, only the five largest dock regions score. You can deprive your opponent of a point by playing water cards to close off a 1-card dock region, so playing water cards (and getting a coin for each) can sometimes be just as effective as playing dock cards. And thus, trying to run your opponent out of coins can sometimes blow up in your face.
The ship adds another level of danger. Some dock and water cards have a ship symbol on them. When one of these is played, you can (before adding the card to the layout) move the (very attractive) wooden ship marker to any water card in the layout, and remove any adjacent dock card that has a ship symbol on it -- so long as it's in a dock region that hasn't been fully enclosed by water and the edge of the board yet. This means that any dock card with a ship on it is vulnerable to attack, unless you can play it somewhere that's not adjacent to water (difficult to manage for long), or seal off the region that contains it, or position the ship next to it (as a card can't be removed by the ship unless the ship moves adjacent to it).
The result of all of these factors is a game with a surprising amount of both tactics and strategy. You can try to run your opponent out of coins, or try to beat him in a region by playing cards, or try to hack into his score by closing off his small regions or (and this is quite sinister) combining two regions that he's winning in into one. (Regions score one victory point regardless of their size.) You can use the ship to remove your own cards, splitting one dock region in which you're behind into two, one of which you're ahead in. If you're in a position to play the first card that extends a row or column to being 7 cards long, you're in a position to dictate where the edge of the board is -- and this can either quickly enclose a region or prevent it from being enclosed.
One beautiful aspect of the game is that every card is balanced. The dock cards with three warehouses on them are very powerful, but they also have low numbers on them, so you almost never get to surprise your opponent with one. Weaker dock cards (with fewer warehouses) have higher numbers, or coin symbols. One of the highest-numbered dock cards in the game is the tavern, which has no warehouses on it at all but almost always gets played first in the turn, which can be used to devastating effect (especially if you're using it to combine two regions that your opponent is winning in). The dock cards with ship symbols on them are high-numbered, so you usually have the initiative when you play them, but the ship symbol makes them vulnerable to attack.
It's easy to be unenthusiastic about this game if you've only played its extremely lackluster basic game. It's important to play the basic game to learn how the unusual game mechanics function, but the basic game is really a trivial exercise. The advanced game is the real game.
Two other things about this game are worth mentioning. One is that the components are just gorgeous. The cards are lovely, the wooden coins are a pleasure, and even the scoring pawns are unusual in design. The other is that even after the advanced game has worn out its welcome (though after 20 playings this has yet to happen to me), the game includes rules (and special cards) for four-player partnership play, and there are are many variant rules (see the links section) for alternative harbor layouts that change the tactics considerably.
All this in a game that retails for $20. What's not to like?
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Charles Bahl
United States
San Jose
California
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Re:User Review
UhhhClem (#3913),
Good article. This is a great but also (sadly and inexplicably) an overlooked game. I am willing to play it at every opportunity.
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Re:User Review
You can now buy Kontor for 5.95 euro (!) from www.adam-spielt.de
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Marco Calcaterra
Italy
Roma
Unspecified
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Re:User Review
Just tried Kontor yesterday for the first time.
It is a GREAT game, and as you say, a very overlooked one.
For me, a true gem. (Only tried 2 Players)
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