OUR REVIEW

MINING BENEATH THE ICE

SIBERIA

SELL RESOURCES WITH A PROFIT

Siberia, an inconspicuous box, light blue, featuring a pipeline and a man in winter cloths in the snow on its cover. Classically beautiful, but inconspicuous! But the game that’s hiding in this box is a real gem. The rules are rather simple and allow a lot of different tactics, and the element of luck also is given its due. But, for the moment, enough of eulogies, let’s take a look at the facts.

I would classify Siberia as a simple economics game for the whole family. You try to collect as many resources as possible with your workers and then you try to sell those resources for the highest possible profit at one of the stock exchanges. For this you must of course take cards to place your sales man at the right stock exchange , because otherwise it might happen that you must sell diamonds for 2000 Rubles, which another player was able to sell for 6000 Rubles per unit.

Which actions you really can resolve is for the biggest part decided by chance. Each of the players draws six action tiles from a bag at the start of the game, which all then must place simultaneously on their own player boards. For this placement there are several possibilities: With the exception of the manager tile, which functions as a joker, each action tile shows two halves. One half shows one of the five resources, the other half one of the four other characters in the game. You can always decide if you want to place the tile into the corresponding resources column or into the character column. If you cannot or do not want to place the tile in any of the corresponding columns you must place it into the research area in order to put new resources onto the board. In the research area each tile counts for the resource that is pictured on the tile (the manager tile stands for any resource of your choice. Such resources must be placed by all players at the start of each turn onto any part of the board where this resource is not yet present. This is followed by the rest of the actions. For each area in which you have two action tiles you may resolve the corresponding action and must then discard the tiles. This is continued in turn until all players have passed. For the resources action each of your own workers on the board can mine the corresponding resource in his area, which is immediately sold at a stock exchange you occupy.

For the character actions each character features a special ability:

The manager, for instance, can support one of his workers. One of the two manager tiles is put back into the bag, and the other one can be put in any area.

The Logistician allows you to move workers which are already in Siberia by a total of three steps, distributed among workers anyway you like.

The salesman enables you to place a pawn as a salesman at one of the stock exchanges or to relocate a pawn there to another stock exchange.

The Worker introduces a new pawn to Siberia, the pawn is placed on Vladivostok.

And finally, the most important one, the Investor: He enables you to take one of the four openly displayed investment tiles and to place it on a free spot in the corresponding column of your player board. Those tiles are considered to be action tiles, but stay in place till the end of the game and so reduce the number of action tiles you need to resolve an action.

A few more rules:

Each area from where the last resource is removed, is considered to be exhausted and is closed. This means, all workers in this area are returned to their employers and the area is marked with an exhaustion counter.

Should a player be out of pawns in his stock he can remove any pawn of his choice from the board when he wants to place a pawn.

The game ends when either all eight exhaustion markers have been placed on closed areas or when three of the five supplement areas for resources are exhausted.

In both cases the current round of the game is continued till its end.

Siberia is a very beautiful and thrilling game, albeit demanding a bit of attention from all players, as otherwise errors might easily happen when you replenish resources on the board, and you suddenly end up with two units of the same resource in one area. But this problem has a rather easy solution, you simply put back one of the resources into stock.

A bit more complicated is the correction of another error that might happen, that you put resources back into stock when they have been sold instead of removing them from the game, because this might result in a rather long game!

Setting aside those small handling traps, Siberia is a very clear and easily learned game. As it should be the case for a good family game the ratio of luck versus tactics is very well balanced.

Christoph VAVRU ( g.vavru@aon.at )

Players: 2-4

Age: 10+

Time: 60+

Designer: Reiner Stockhausen

Art: Klemens Franz

Price: ca. 35 Euro

Publisher: dlp games 2011

Web: www.dlp-games.de

Genre: Economics game

Users: For families

Version: multi

Rules: de en fr

In-game text: no

Comments:

Simple rules

Lots of tactical options

Care needed when adjusting the board components

Compares to:

Other games on demand and supply including price adaptions

Other editions:

Currently none

My rating: 6

Christoph Vavru:

A real gem for the whole family due to balanced relations of tactics and luck!

Chance (pink): 0

Tactic (turquoise): 3

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 2

Interaction (brown): 2

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0