OUR REVIEW
Family
Schatzsuche im Château D’If
Das Geheimnis von Monte Cristo
Moderner Action Slide in altem Schloss
Today somehow you need an English connection for something to be hip and modern and to excite the „young generation“ and to be at the front of the crowd. „Board game“ seems to be to old-fashioned to get someone to write home about – no, it needs to be a cras board game, with lots of meeples and – even crasser – with a cool Action Slide, as seen in „The Secret of Monte Cristo” that was recently published by eggertspiele. The term of “ball path“ would be too reminiscent of a children’s game.
The game by Arnaud Urbon and Charles Chevallier surely is not a children-äs game, despite the rules comprising only four pages including many illustration and being quickly read and quickly learned. The story of the treasure hunters who make their way by boat from Marseille to the Château d‘ If to find the legendary treasures of the Count of Monte Cristo seems a bit constructed, but implemented impressively and full of atmosphere by Michel Menzel’s graphics for board and supply cards.
Following the Marble
The core of the game are four actions which are always carried out in the same order, the order in which players can implement actions is governed by the above mentioned „Action Slide“. In this slide each treasure hunter has four marbles of his color in four lanes of the slide, six marbles if there are only two playing, the starting position is determined randomly. An action marker marks the lane that is active and thus the action available to the player whose marble is situated at the bottom of the lane. He turns into the active player. After he has carried out his action he places his marble on top of another lane of his choice – at no time may there be more than 7 marbles all in all in a given lane and never more than 3 marbles of the same color - and the action marker is moved to the next lane and thus the next action.
The four possible actions are:
SUPPLY
The active player draws a number of cards equal to the number of players in the game, chooses one of the cards and distributes the others among his fellow players. The cards have multiple functions: They depict different numbers of treasure hunters. In accordance with the card given to them you the number of men shown on the card from general stock and put them down before yourself on the table. These men can be placed into Chateau d’If. Furthermore, the cards show bags of different colors. These bags are needed later in the game to transport the treasures you did find, because according to the rules a green emerald can only be carried away in a green bag, rubies only in a red one, and so on.
Adventurers:
If you want to find treasures you should start with sending a few treasure hunters into the castle. This happens with this action. Here, too, the active player has an advantage, because all other players can only place one man in a dungeon of the Château or into one of the bonus zones – we will get back to those later – while the active player can place three men!
Treasure Chest:
Okay, for a start some of your treasure hunters have managed to get into the Château, so all that is needed are the treasures. To ensure that there is no lack of treasures in each round three new, randomly drawn treasure tiles are placed into different dungeons. As soon as there are four tiles in any given dungeon a scoring happens instantly. Old hands in adventure gaming will immediately realize that here they can directly influence when and especially where a scoring will happen, provided they have their own marble in place at the bottom of this action lane and can be active player. And exactly for this purpuse – to influence your position in the lane – there is action number four:
Rearrange:
The active player – and he alone – may either move one of his marbles in any lane of his choice down by one or two positions and thus determine where and when he will have a turn next time, or he can raise the market value of a gem variety by moving the corresponding marker up on the track by one or two positions. The numbers shown next to the gems show how valuable the respective variety is a the moments. This not only allows you in an excellent way to influence the order of play but also to influence the victory points your treasure hunter will accrue per gem he can carry away when a scoring happens in the castle.
Interested in a small bonus?
Well, yes, the actions described above are not too complicated, and yes, for a game that has been published by eggertspiele this seems to be a bit meager. How practical, that there is the bonus area at the top of the board, who can be used as an alternative when placing men in the Château. This bonus is activated immediately and for instance gives you a joker bag that you can use as a bag for any color of gem, three additional treasure hunter that come to you free without any supply card or – even more directly – two victory points. The forth and last bonus option is to reinforce your men in the dungeons and basically is identical with the action “Adventurers” on the slide. If you place a man in this bonus spot you can instantly place up to two men from your personal stock into the dungeons.
3 times 3 equals 9 – the scoring
Let’s get to the point that is of paramount interest to real adventurers: How do I gain access to the treasures?! This too, is happening – totally in contrast to the general opinion on the behavior of greedy treasure hunters – in a very orderly and organized way: As soon as four treasure tiles are present in any dungeon, which usually happens first after approx. 15 minutes into the game we begin to collect gems. And this not only in the dungeon with the four treasure tile, but in turn in all six dungeons, even if they do not yet contain four treasure tiles. If you have most men in a dungeon you fill your bag first (in case of a tie the one who was there first goes first). But who is an honorable treasure hunter sticks to the well-known code of honor: Only one gem per bag and only into a bag of the same color as the gem.
Expressed in terms of game mechanics a player must discard a supply card showing a bag of the corresponding color for each tile of value 1 he wants to remove from the dungeon. Should the tile be marked with a value of 2 or 3 you need the corresponding number of bags in the color of the tile. When then there are any tiles left it is the turn of the player with the second-most number of treasure hunters in this dungeon, and so on. When all players have plundered the dungeons more or less successfully, victory points are finally awarded, because how else could Michael Menzel have decorated the board with a jazzy Kramer bar at the bottom end.
This is the point where you can really skim off a lot, because the value of each tile that you collect is multiplied by the current market value of the gem variety. Should, for instance, a sapphire currently be worth 3 points and I own a sapphire tile of value 3 I score 9 points. The successful treasure hunters are put back into the general stock and play goes on, usually for about 60 minutes all in all until the winner is determined, it will be the player who first reaches or tops 40 victory points!
Cards are on the table
They are – and in the truest sense of the phrase! Each of the up to four players knows at any time who has how many men in his personal stock, who has how many bags of what color and – thanks to the action slide – even who will when have a turn with which action next. The strategic possibilities seem endless and fans of optimizing look forward to a long night with a game for which the extensive deliberations to garner the optimum of victory points from a turn can only be limited by the use of a sand timer. But as is the case so often the real flow of the game is completely different from those expectations.
Of course all components are visible and of course I can make an educated guess what the others might want to do. But when the action “Rearrange” comes into play, then strategy is mutating into tactics to ensure a minimum of success in reaction to the changes in market value or order of play that my predecessor has just engineered. At this point the otherwise rather worthy and well-behaved even develops a small ability to annoy.
Unfortunately, in the end, not much can be planned. Too random is the distribution of bags and men on the supply cards so that the joker bag can only be a last stand solution and that at the cost of one man less in the Château. Too random are the colors and values of the tiles that are drawn out of the bag and distributed by the active player in the dungeons. In the end one rather reacts to the actions of the other players and the events in the game themselves than instigate those events oneself.
Experienced players will notice after a few games that chance plays a much bigger part than suspected at first and start to play – if they play – purely based on instincts. And this seems to be what “The Secret of Monte Cristo” is aiming at. Once again it is the games-playing family that needs to be enticed to the play, which should succeed thanks to the attractive components with wooden figures, glittering markers to mark the market value and the very stylish board that has been given an intense design nicely reflecting the flair of the game.
Really new?
Is there really nothing more to criticize? Nothing but maybe that the – according to the publisher’s text – novel and not-seen-before Action Slide is not as new as that. One could surely and more easily placed four tracks next to each other in the manner of “Caylus” and relocate the markers manually. The effect would have been the same.
Funnily enough exactly that has been done for the market in “The Secret of Monte Cristo”. If I move one of my marbles in the lane of the slide downwards or move a gem up on a track is six of one and half a dozen of another, but with the difference that the Action Slide looks a lot cooler. All the same: To use two different mechanisms within the same game to achieve the same result within the same game seems not really thought-through.
Which takes us round full circle! The Action Slide sounds cool, looks cool, works well and you cannot resent that the publisher tries to entice young players away from Playstation & Co. to the games table with “coolness” as an eye-catcher. “The Secret of Monte Cristo” should succeed in this undertaking, because one also plays with one’s eyes.
Stefan Olschewski
OUR REVIEW – PLAYED FOR YOU
Kid
Family
Friends
Expert
Alter
Spezial
Players : 2-4
Age : 10+
Duration : 60+
Designer : Arnaud Urbon, Charles Chevallier
Artist : Michael Menzel
Price : ca. 30 Euro
Publisher : eggertspiele 2011
Web : www.eggertspiele.de
Genre : Strategic acquisition game
Users : For families
Version : de
Rules : de en fr fi
In-game text : no
Comments:
Very beautiful design * good, short rules * rather high chance element * more tactical than strategical
Compares to:
Other worker placement games with options for actions and majority scoring
Other editions:
Z-Man Games, Filosofia Editions, Asmodee, Lautapelit
My rating : 4
Statements Stefan Olschewski:
Neat mechanisms provide intense gameplay after easy access to the game. The action slide idea seems a bit put-on, all in all this is a nice family game with some tactics and a good deal of luck with topical adventure feeling despite rather dry mechanisms.
Chance 1
Tactic 2
Strategy__ 2
Creativity 0
Knowledge 0
Memory 0
Communication 2
Interaction 1
Dexterity 0
Action 1