Macao - 20 March 2013

Round at David's this week for a first play of Macao. This is one of the more difficult games to describe but here goes...

The game is based around spending different coloured cubes on a variety of actions. Cubes are gained in a novel way. Each turn dice are thrown (one for each colour cube) and the players can pick two of the colours. The clever bit is that the number rolled shows both the number of cubes you will get and how many turns you will have to wait before they arrive. So you are forced to make the choice between major gains 5 or 6 turns in the future and immediate availability of resources. When the game only lasts 12 turns, that's quite a lot to balance.

You use your cubes to buy cards which make up your entourage - people, buildings and offices. These enable you to develop your own private economy - providing free cubes, exchanging cubes for money (or vice versa) - or provide other special advantages. You can also buy city districts in Macao (in the process gaining you goods to trade with Europe), advance your counter along the city wall (deciding turn order) or move your ship towards European ports for trade.

The point of the game is to gain victory points. These can be won by selling goods from the city quarters via your ship, or by buying them at a random exchange rate each turn. At game end you also earn points for your longest chain of city districts and for a number of special "game end" cards you can purchase throughout the game.

It's really difficult to describe and very difficult to play well. Some cards appear to be very powerful, but require 4 different colour cubes and early in the game trying to get 4 colours aligned is extremely difficult. Each turn you have to pick a card to place in a staging area and if they build up too much you lose points. So you have to balance selecting cheap easy to buy cards with the game changing expensive and difficult to place cards. You have no built in way of generating cash, so if you want to make use of the exchange rate to earn points you have to build the economy yourself out of the cards you select.

We must play this again soon.

James 85
Kieron 70
David 61
Andy 51