A first try for another of Adrian’s presents from Orhan, and, given the small number of Rivals and the Easter holidays, we invited 2 guest gamers to join in - Fred and Felix. Colonia is a beautifully produced game where you deploy your workers, Puerto Rico style, to acquire power in the Council, acquire resources, turn these into goods, ship the goods, and use money (in four currencies) to buy relics which provide victory points. The game has some very clever mechanisms and some really nice ideas. I particularly liked the town council edicts which are voted on by the players to amend (or not) the rules in a given phase. There is a fair amount of luck in the game - especially in the ship departures and the relics which come up, and there was a feeling that this meant that the game was somewhat more reactive and less predictable than we would have liked. We considered that displaying which relics and ships were going to come up might fix this to some extent. Looking on boardgamegeek (where it scores 6.9) the mood was for more interaction - eg by allowing trading of goods and resources between players - and for giving more stability to allow players to see what is coming up (as we felt). At any rate though this game played well, finished promptly (we were done by 10.30pm including learning the rules), and was fun. For our game common strategies were employed - 3 players had a run on relics from Bergen; Felix tried to corner the Novgorod market (foiled by Orhan) and Adrian was fortunate (or skilful???) to get the Belgian top relic and shrine (which doubled its VP value). Orhan upped the drama stakes by declaring his vote on edicts last (whether or not he actually got a vote!). And Felix bizarrely named the ‘footwear’ goods as ‘Geoffreys” (coz they looked like Court Jesters’ shoes and he got the name confused). So Geoffreys it is then. Final scores: Adrian 17; Deej 16; Fred 12; Orhan 12; Felix 10. Good fun.
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