Quick Overview
Players take on the role of European empires who are competing for control over a newly discovered archipelago. This archipelago has a native population, so the players must balance their actions with the unrest of these natives.
The game progresses by players exploring, expanding, and exploiting. They can harvest resources, grow their population, or build on controlled territory. At the end of every round, they can spend money to buy either new action cards, or building blueprints. Periodically, players will have to handle crises from the native population, or face unrest and potential revolution.
Victory points are earned from three sources in this game: a public goal (eg. have the most cows), private goals for each player (players can score others' goals), and building Wonders. This is a low scoring game: our medium length game ended with our scores at 7/7/6.
Busy, busy, busy.
Archipelago plays like someone decided they liked too many concepts and threw them together. It is the opposite of a streamlined game. It is an Auction, Resource Management, Tableau Building, Area Control, Tile Placing, Hidden Information, Semi-Cooperative, Negotiation game. Within most of these mechanics, there are elements I would cut or modify to streamline the play.
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| Archipelago Action Palette |
Graphic Design
An example of this over-busy mentality: pictured on the left is the action board for the game. Around the board are the thirteen different actions you can take on your turn. The graphic design is a mess. Actions are not limited to the outer ring, if you look closely you'll see a small green cutout for Hiring Workers on the inner left side. There is no reason this board needs to be so busy. The six Gather Resources actions could easily be combined into one area; the Hire Workers, and Reproduce actions should be located closer together.
Resource Management
This mentality goes beyond the graphic design. There are six separate resources you can collect: wood, stone, iron, cattle, fruit, and fish. Of these resources, Iron is only used to build wonders; cattle and exotic fruit are only used to build markets. Cattle and exotic fruit are redundant resources. The game is not improved significantly by making fruit more valuable in the foreign market than cattle, and cattle more valuable in the domestic market. Iron can easily replace replace cattle's use for the domestic market. Reducing the market to 5 goods would increase the tension to manipulate the market, and allow you to better plan for crises.
Tile Placement (exploration)
If you manage to place a new hexagon onto the board, then you're rewarded with resources from that tile (usually), as well as a Wild good. But, if you can't place a tile, then you get nothing. Nothing. Your turn has been wasted and the next player goes. This is unnecessarily frustrating for the player who fails that action. This non-reward is a bad type of tension to add to the game. With three types of terrains to match (water, land, and mountains), this is an unfortunately common situation. One solution might be to forgo your Exploration Tile to keep drawing until you get a placeable tile.
Hidden Information
I generally like Hidden Information games. Suburbia is in my Top 10 list, and I thoroughly enjoy everything from Coup and One Night Ultimate Werewolf to Ticket to Ride. Archipelago's hidden goals are frustrating and serve only to unfocus peoples' plans. Diversifying into everything will net many points, but leads to a bland empire. It does not feel as satisfying as cornering the market on stone, and forcing people to pay for overpriced goods when you deign to sell them. I would recommend two public goals, and being dealt two private goals from which you pick one. That would allow you to focus your plans while not ignoring what others are doing.
So, what works?
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| Various personality cards available for purchase |
Tableau Building
This provides interesting decisions. If you buy a Personality, then others may use it against you. You have to balance which cards you want. Also, building a Wonder is one of the few ways to earn victory points, and usually carries an additional benefit as well. Rotating the cards to modify the price allows you to remove cards others may want, or at least modify their value.
Auction
You bid for turn order. It's a lazy design for player order, but it works. Since the winner picks the entire player order sequence, you have more reason to bid. Furthermore, this, along with the crises give negotiations a meaning to the game.
Markets
The use of both a domestic and foreign market provides an interesting dynamic. The crises act to remove goods from the market (thereby increasing prices again). This works nicely, and you will be punished if you neglect to sell a particular type of good. One tweak I would make is a way to exchange goods between the two markets (*there is one personality that lets you do this).
In Summary
This game design has potential. For as many mechanics as the game includes, it does a not terrible job at blending them together. However, there are rough edges which could have been sanded down during the design and playtesting phase. For new players, the hidden information provides a wildly variable end score. Exploration can be a frustrating and reductive experience. With some modification, these issues could be resolved.
The core of Archipelago is its market. In the market's current form, the game works. There is back and forth, as resources are necessary for money, building, and crises. With some refinement, this could be an amazing resource management game.
Final rating: 4/10. Those rough edges are irritating. I left the game frustrated. It was not a fun or rewarding experience. The game does not do any particular aspect better than other games, in an over-busy design that takes too long to play. Were it an hour game, I might cut it more slack, but it's not worth the 2 hours dedicated to play it.
*All pictures taken from Boardgamegeek galleries. Siromist took the personalities picture as well as the action plate.
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