Working Together... Mostly

I received a number of new board games for Christmas last year, and over the past few months I've written about most of them. But one that I have yet to comment on is Archipelago, by Christophe Boelinger. It's set in the islands of the New World as European explorers attempt to control it and extract its resources... without angering the local population to the point of uprising.

There are a lot of interesting mechanics at work in the game. There's a market system which allows the price of buying and selling goods to rise and fall according to demand. There's a deck of cards the lets players purchase bonuses to their strategy; those cards also have a changing price scale, loosely affected by the length of time players have turned them down.

But the real twist at the heart of the game is its system of tracking unrest in the archipelago. Players must work together to provide the goods needed to keep the local population happy. But in the end, there will in fact by one true winner of the game; you don't want to be the only one constantly paying to keep the population happy, or you'll be depleted of resources compared to your competitors. And for an extra added wrinkle, each player draws a secret victory goal at the start of the game, one of which can be to actually encourage insurrection.

All of this makes for an interesting variety in the gameplay that makes me eager to try the game some more. The first time I played with my friends, unrest wasn't remotely a consideration. We easily kept the natives in check, and I found myself wondering why the game had you go to so much trouble tracking something that didn't really matter. But the second time we played, we collectively lost the game on just the third round, as unchecked hostility among the natives quickly surged to a level where it was too late to do anything about it; we all lost the game collectively.

The large number of bits in the game means that it takes quite a bit of space to play it. It's also intimidating from a rules perspective. The lengthy rule book makes it seem considerably more complicated than it actually is. But if you can look past that, the game itself seems to be a solidly conceived, very fun affair. I give it a B+.