OUR REVIEW

Puzzling with ship parts

NAUTICUS

Free is rather cheap

„A ship is coming, bringing me my point, the one point I love, a ship is coming, fulfilling my desire from many a gaming night I'm dreaming of."

One ship alone, unfortunately, will not be enough to win by far, the more ships the better and the bigger, that is, the longer, the more victory points it is promising. The assembling of the ship parts reminds me of the tower construction in "Asara" (awarded Spiel der Spiele 2011). We cast our minds back: Each tower has to consist of at least a base and a top, and you could introduce any number of middle parts or floors - rather illogically also after placing a top - but all parts hat to have the same color.

The ships in this game, respectively, are combined out of hull, mast and sail tiles and must be assembled in exactly this order; (only) mast and sail must on principle have the same "color", here represented by a symbol. Such a completed one-mast ship does not look very well geared to travel on the High Seas, it looks more like it is about to topple at any moment either forward or backwards and sink as soon as it enters the water. Your eye and also your victory point account will be much more pleased by a two- or three-mast ship; and a very heartfelt "ahoy" is given to a four-mast ship. Each part of the hull must - in case of those multiple-mast sips - carry an additional mast and sail, again of the same color/symbol, but for those ships the individual hull parts differ - there are bow and stern parts and middle parts. Retroactive expansion of a ship - by inserting middle parts - is explicitly forbidden in Nauticus. The more strict construction rules are meeting the game mood requirements a bit better, but consequent and consecutive logic is still missing. You are still allowed to have a ship that is fully equipped at one side and is awaiting its completion, kind of hanging about in mid-air. Even more irritating and strange is the fact, that you can already load commodities on such a half-constructed ship wreck, albeit with unloading, that is, delivering the goods being still impossible.

How do we acquire our ship parts? For this purpose the designer have provided an action wheel, or roundel, that is newly assembled in each round and which enables us to use a total of eight different actions. The game mechanism here picks up the multiply proven idea that the player who is allowed to choose first is given an exclusive bonus, but that the other players are allowed to implement the same action, of course without the bonus for the active player. Three of the actions provided are used for acquiring hull parts, masts or sails. This is of course not without cost, but costs you between zero and three coins for each part (the price changes in each round. Wait a minute, there is something to be had for zero coins, so there are things for free? No, because there is a second currency, worker cubes, which have to be spent, that is, discarded, after each use - like the ever-scarce money (obviously each paid job is coupled to a deadly accident at work). So you have to pay for a free part with a worker cube. New and very well designed is the mechanism that each provides between zero and three virtual free workers that you can use, but who are forfeit if you do not choose the action. Despite of all this, you will not want to and will not be able to join every action, has another reason besides the ever-present scarcity of money and workers - passing an action earns you victory points.

Really and truly completely free of any charge, even without cost in workers, is the fifth part that you buy, albeit only if the previous bought parts have been a set of four different parts. On the other end of the scale, the acquisition of additional identical parts is possible only at very high costs, in general four coins plus worker. So, does that mean that you will in general be interested to acquire such a fifth part? No, because during all of the game there is one "golden rule" in place: All parts that are acquired (more or less) for free cannot be used immediately, but must be stored first on your private player board. For the further use of such stored parts, getting them to the ship and adding it to the ship, you must use another action altogether, which does not cost money, but one worker for each part that you transport. The fate of a stop in storage does also hit those ship parts that, due to logical reasons, cannot be added to the ship immediately, for instance sails, for which the masts are still lacking. This problem can be avoided quite well by applying a bit of logistics and planning, but the greed for free parts can still result in an overfull storage, where certain ship parts slowly acquire a coating of dust, while you do not manage on time to turn them into magnificent ships.

In this way all players have to solve their respective optimization tasks, whereby the puzzling together of the ship parts and the equally necessary logistics for storage administration present a challenging and enticing task insofar as you may instantly choose for each completed ship - besides the points that wins you at the end of the game - between one and four rewards, depending on the number of masts in the completed ship. And those rewards are really for free! The dilemma with those rewards is that they are really hard to choose from - to which reward should I treat myself? Of course one would like to have them all. Among the choices there are "joker" masts and sails, which not only can be put on any ship instantly, but they also yield victory points during the game with certain actions. If you receive such joker ship parts within the transport action this can lead to a chain of additional completed ships and even more blessed gifts.

Shipping fish with finished ships:

Next to building the ships the buying and selling of commodities is a deciding source of victory points for the game-end scoring. Those commodities are available in four types, where you can accrue more points if you have several commodities of the same type. During the shopping action each identical commodity costs you an additional four (instead of zero to three) coins, so that it is not easy to collect identical commodities. And, of course, your fellow players can buy up the last items of the commodity you want, so that you should decide on one kind at the start of the game that is not yet much in demand. It is also important - and is very often forgotten in the beginning - to remember that the sale of commodities does not earn you coins. Anyway, the action wheel also provides an opportunity to acquire money. The workers are another case altogether: Workers can only be acquired with some of the starting player bonuses for actions, so that you - as the one having first choice - are forced to choose a less attractive action to be able to increase one's work force a bit again. As an alternative you can also take three worker cubes as a reward for completed ships, but usually joker ship parts are the preferred choice. Anyway, you can still choose to pass at your own action selection after you have taken the action bonus.

And this takes us the third possibility in which you can accrue points during the five rounds and that are not to be looked at askance. With the eighth and final action you receive victory points for each joker ship part that you own, even if it is still accumulating dust in storage, and for each previous passing in the current round. A second motivation for passing is the fact that a joint using of every action is penalized at the end of the round with six penalty points, so that you should forfeit an action at least once or twice a round. For some actions this forfeiting is rather easy - if I would like to concentrate on the building of ships I need not be involved in trading commodities; if I want to ship lots of commodities I will not not want to start a new ship in the last third of the game. A mix of strategies seems less recommendable, as this also enhances the risk of dissipation. And yet, there always develops a beautiful dilemma of decisions, especially when an action than one could easily forfeit comes accompanied by three virtual free workers.

The amount of those free workers is distributed in each round randomly and anew on the eight actions, so that your own strategy can face a nice breeze or a strong headwind, randomly provided by the God of the Seas. It is especially aggravating when maybe the preferred action is offering only one or even zero workers in more than one consecutive round. In fact, a timely storage policy helps to mitigate such bad luck a bit, but good workers are unfortunately hard to come by in sufficient numbers. Furthermore, in each round only seven of eight actions are activated, so that success or failure of one's own way to play also depends largely on the desires and plans of one's fellow players. For instance, it would be very awkward if another player would choose the action of selling commodities before one had the opportunity to load commodities on one's ships. Or, if another player goes shopping for sails and adding them to this ship and one is still lacking the masts and so has to store sails first. As a last stand every player has one private special action during the game, but this you would of course like to use more efficiently than as a gap-stopping action.

Components are of adequately good quality, a bit harassing is the sorting of the many tiles before and after the game. The rules explain everything quite nicely, but some details, which furthermore only come into play rather rarely, come across as too awkward and as ballast for the rules.

Harald Schatzl

Players: 2-4

Age: 12+

Time: 120+

Designer: Wolfgang Kramer, Michael Kiesling

Artist: Alexander Jung

Price: ca. 40 Euro

Publisher: Kosmos Verlag 2013

Web: www.kosmos.de

Genre: Building, resources management

Users: With friends

Version: de

Rules: de

In-game text: no

Comments:

Very good and extensive rules

Game mechanisms fit the background story only moderately well

Basically good graphic design, but still danger of mix-ups for certain actions

Compares to:

Games with a bonus for choice of action (Puerto Rico, Race for the Galaxy)

Other editions:

Currently none

My rating: 5

Harald Schatzl:

A tactical and strategic building and optimization game with a very low amount of chance that offers challenging fund; in the wake of "Die Paläste von Carrara" probably another sure candidate for appearing on the nomination list for "Kennerspiel des Jahres" 2014.

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 3

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