Tobago-ning

It's been part of my board game collection for a few months now, but I just realized that I've never said anything about the game Tobago. It's a rather quick game where players take on the role of archaeologists, digging up treasure on an island.

There are four possible treasures hidden "somewhere" on the board at any given time. To identify the precise location of a treasure, a player can (on his turn) play a "map piece" card to ever-growing columns of cards representing each of the four treasures. For example, I might play a card on my turn that states the black treasure is "not in the mountains," while you on your turn play one that states "it is within two spaces of a palm tree." Eventually, enough map pieces will accumulate so that there is only one possible space on the game board where a treasure can be buried, and then the race is on!

When a player drives his "ATV" to the location of a treasure, he gets a treasure card with a random value between 2 and 6 from a treasure deck. But also, each player who contributed map pieces in defining the treasure location gets one treasure card for each map piece. And it's not quite so simple as dealing them off a deck. Each player gets to look at the number of treasures he is eligible to receive. But then all the players' cards are shuffled together (along with one extra that no one peeked at). Then cards are revealed one at a time and a sort of "draft" ensues. Players elect one at a time whether they want to take the offered card, or press their luck to wait for a possibly better card later in the stack. (Perhaps it's a better card they know is there, from having glimpsed it earlier.)

There are a few more wrinkles that I won't go into, but suffice it to say that the game does have a bit more of a luck element than I'm usually fond of in my board games. But it's definitely not all about luck. Strategy does matter. And the board is modular in a way that allows plenty of different island configurations to add replay value to the game. I might still bristle a bit at the luck factor, except the game is a brisk 30 minutes -- 45 at the outside, even with players prone to "analysis paralysis" -- and certainly sustains enough fun for that length of time.

This isn't one to recommend to hardcore strategists, but strikes me as another good "bridge" game to get any non-gamers in your life over the water from Monopoly to Puerto Rico.