Malo-dorous

I recently wrote about the eighth installment in the Alea medium-box series, Las Vegas. I also picked up #9 in the series, Saint Malo... but I didn't have as good an experience with it.

Saint Malo is a building game. Each player has a 45 space board and a variety of people and buildings that can occupy the spaces. Each time it's your turn, you roll 5 dice, and you get two more chances to reroll any number of those dice (while keeping the rest). After three rolls, you pick one symbol you've rolled, and build that thing -- the quality of it scaling with the number of dice you've rolled matching that symbol.

Most things are positional in the game. You want to build a run of churches... and position priests on your board in places to score those churches. You want to position jugglers next to a variety of other people. You want to position merchants next to goods so that you can earn gold. And so on.

But the game seems to have two significant flaws. First is a mechanic in which everyone is raided periodically by pirates. Some symbols on the dice advance the likelihood of a pirate attack, and whenever one comes, players need to have a sufficient strength in walls and soldiers to fend them off. If you fail, you're down 5 points at the end of the game. The amount of strength needed to repel the pirates increases throughout the game, so this really isn't something you can punt on. Nor can you give up on it early and then focus on it later, because if you don't have the 3 strength required to repel the pirates in round 2, you're unlikely to have the 5 strength needed to repel them in round 3.

Ignoring the pirate problem (or simply failing to roll the dice in a way that keeps them at bay) is going to snowball for you until you lose more and more points. If the game were more balanced, perhaps you could try a strategy that says "I'm ignoring pirates, and I will try to amass enough points to overcome the penalties for doing so." But the -5 point penalty for each pirate failure -- when there are as many as six pirate attacks in a game -- makes that untenable.

The second problem is the "clever" gimmick at the heart of the game. Each player's board is made of a dry erase material, and every player gets a marker. When you build things on your board, you draw them in. The game could easily have shipped with a variety of chits used to represent the different buildings and people, but someone thought it would be novel to have people "color" in this game. And the problem is, the markers the game ships with (partly due to the material the boards are made of) sticks to human hands far better than they do to the boards. By the end of our first game, half the players had ink all over their hands, and had been forced to redraw things several times after dragging their hands accidentally through things they'd drawn earlier. It was, in every sense, a mess. It took three hand washings and a shower before my hands were clean again.

I'm not quite ready to pronounce Saint Malo a total failure after just one play, but if it isn't the worst game in the medium-box series, it's surely only topped by Augsburg 1520. Unless you're maintaining a full collection as I am, I wouldn't recommend it. I will try it again, I expect, but I'm quite skeptical. I give it a C-.