presentation

Carthago

Merchants & Guilds

In the ancient trading metropolis of Carthago you want to increase your wealth and your influence and to improve your position within the Traders Guild. In three decades of five rounds each you ship commodities, finance war ships and gain influence in the Traders Guild, thus collecting victory points to win with most points at the end of the game.

After preparing the decade, you play five action rounds in which each player takes one action or passes his turn. You place the action disc on the action slot, play a trade or basic card for the selected action plus one more card for each action disc of another player on the selected slot; neutral action discs are moved to the next slot without a neutral disc. For a Guild token in the selected slot, you can also resolve the Guild action or decide to pass on your selected action and do the guild action only; the guild token goes to the next slot without guild token. Action options are Market to get new cards, Residence for upgrades, Trading Dock for delivering commodities or Warship Dock for a share of expedition spoils or Delivery to a Harbor. For a Guild action, you place an Influence disc on a free seat in the Traders Guild.

After three decades, you multiply acquired ships with acquired seats in the Guild - those are determined by influence discs in the Guild plus both unlocked bonus seats and unlocked columns in the Residency - and add to that the completed Achievement tiles.

A highly interesting game on lots of options, scarce resources, few actions and even less tolerance for mistakes; planning is essential, especially as regards to ship orders.

Players: 2-4

Age: 12+

Time: 90+

Designer: Bernd Eisenstein, Ralph Bienert

Art: Christian Opperer, Odysseas Stamoglou

Price: ca. 29 Euro

Publisher: Game’s Up / Irongames 2017

Web: www.games-up.de

Genre: Worker placement, cards

Users: With friends

Version: multi

Rules: de en fr

In-game text: no

Comments:

Graphics fit the topic very nicely

Dilemma and scarcity game

Good rules

Compares to:

Games in the genre  worker placement with cards

Other editions:

Capstone Games (en)

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 2

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 2

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0