Board Gaming - Santa Maria

ratticus (58)in #gaming • 8 years ago (edited)

Santa Maria

This is a game controlled by dice, but with quite a lot of chance to mitigate the randomness of dice.
You start with a blue dice, and the ability to select 3 white dice each round. all the dice are rolled at the start of a round, and players take turns in doing an action, which may or may not involve taking a dice from the pool.

While you can spend money to activate one location, or spend resources to buy a new tile giving you more options, and you can select a dice to use. The dice can be modified up or down 1 by paying for it, and when played, it activates all locations in the corresponding row (blue) or column (white) that aren't already covered by dice or coins. The dice will end on the last available space.

^{A player board with some dice placed already, as well as a few additional tiles placed on the board too}

Planning where to place the new tiles, and when it's worth buying a new tile or saving the resources to activate a shipping action to get reward tiles are quite useful decisions that need to be made through the game, as well as deciding where to allocate your monks when your religion marker has reached a high enough level. Early religion advancement is very advantageous to gain the 2nd and 3rd blue dice, while also allowing monk placements until much later (6 in all). As the game goes on, you'll have to place a monk where someone else already has one, at which point you have to pay them to have your monk at the same location, so getting in first at a key location can be quite profitable in the long run.

The other score track on the board resets after each round, but is one that scores you points and some resources too, which are both very useful. I found this a difficult track to manage, and finished 4th in 2 of the 3 rounds (and 3rd in the other one).

^{The central board, displaying end of game scoring options (bottom of picture), shipping rewards (right side), and dice remaining for selection during this round (top of picture), religious and military tracks}

With all the ways of scoring points, and the variety of the different scoring options that will be available in each game, I felt that in our particular game the military track wasn't really that important, though I didn't get to ship as much as I'd wanted. The score from some of the shipping tiles was quite advantageous, as well as the gains for each of the different types of shipping collected.

I found it quite a fun game, though a little heavier than it initially appeared, with quite a lot of decisions to be made throughout the game.