Gaming Unplugged: Goa - The Most Fun You Can Have With Ginger Outside the Kitchen

In typical "designer" board game fashion, Goa is a game wherein the players compete to build some archaic and ridiculously themed contrivance using far too many pieces of cardboard and wood. Or to be more specific, in Goa you compete to construct colonial era spice trading empires.

You'll obtain both plantations and colonies that produce the pepper, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon. You will then use those spices in a number of ways to increase the power of your empire obtaining better abilities in the game, as well as coveted victory points.

Goa is very iconic of modern board gaming as it represents the best and the worst the industry has to offer. The game play is deep and delightfully subtle while the theme is dry, disinteresting, and clumsily implemented. You're left simultaneously challenged by its complexity while disgusted by the large collection or arbitrary cardboard that litters the table by the end of the night.

The anal retentive amongst you will delight in the opportunity to keep everything straight and tidy. Fans of other Rüdiger Dorn games (e.g. Louis XIV) will be completely unsurprised by this. But if anyone really into board games wonders why they aren't more popular, take out your copy of Goa and go "Oh, I see why. How silly of me."

But the game is, really, quite good. Divided into two halves each having four turns, players will compete in auctions for tiles that offer different rewards. There are plantations which offer spices, and special ability tiles that alter the normal flow of the game. Aside from the spices there are three fundamental resources used in the game to purchase things: ships, colonists, and gold. While ships and gold can be acquired elsewhere in the game, colonists are only available by auction and thus are extremely popular.

A large grid of these tiles is set out in the middle of the table and the starting player will choose one to place the flag marker next to: this flag will indeed be the first item auctioned with the winner being the starting player in the next round. Going around the table, each player then selects a tile adjacent to the last selection and that tile will also be auctioned this turn.

You go all the way around the table once, and the start player makes a second selection to end this part of the round. Now that the tiles to be auctioned have been selected, we can actually get around to the process of auctioning them in the same order they were marked. The player who marked the item up for auction always starts with a zero bid. Bidding will only go around the table once and then the auctioneer will have one last bid, so the player running the auction always has the option to overbid everyone else and keep the tile they marked.

If the auctioneer sells to another player the winner of the auction pays the auctioneer directly. But if the auctioneer decides to keep the tile they pay the bank instead. So this is the only occasion where money will leave the game. This makes for a very weird dynamic and if players are not attentive one player can amass a surprisingly large fortune.

This is exactly what happened in our game. Paul soon had a lot more money than anyone, which he transformed into a lot more ships and colonists than anyone, and thus a much larger trading empire than anyone. Each player has a "development track" that is divided into the various aspects of a spice trading empire and ships and spices are required to progress these tracks along. The further you advance, the more you need to continue advancing.

Which is where the game hit a wall for me: you have a lot of arbitrary little bits that need to be organized in a specific way to find success. I found I never had any of the stuff I needed to do the things I wanted in the action phase, which is what follows the auction. Each player gets to complete three of the various actions in the game: build ships, collect taxes, harvest spices, found a colony, or explore the world. Basically, you are taking advantage of the tiles you've acquired and your capabilities at doing so are determined by your efficiency at advancing the development track. So, when I hit that wall, it basically sunk my entire empire to abject ruin, whereas Paul figured this out early and manipulated it well. Indeed one of the few problems with Goa is that you can easily find someone in an insurmountable lead. This is exacerbated by a discrepancy in player skill, which while not relevant to our game - we were all novices at it - it can be a feature that makes a game extremely annoying.

My wife was in a very similar boat to myself, and we basically spent half the game collecting taxes and using them to buy stuff off Paul. With his rich income, Paul monopolized the starting player position and kicked our asses. Final scores: Paul: 52, Ed: 35, Jen: 33.

I did enjoy Goa as the gameplay was nuanced. I did not enjoy Goa as the bits seemed a bit obnoxiously omnipresent and I totally didn't discover anything resembling a strategy until it was much too late. Which, really, is another problem of the elite of the "designer" board game scene: you need to play them a few times before anything makes sense.

This is probably good for people who have no lives a lot of time to devote to gaming. For someone with a home, a wife, some dogs, two jobs, and a love of many social activities, well, it's a bit prohibitive. Most games in my house don't get played nearly as much as I suspect Goa would demand to fully appreciate.

But there is nothing wrong with Goa, it might just not be for me. Ok, maybe it could have been a bit cleaner in its parts design, but at least it strikes an imposing figure when on the table. Some say this is the King of all auction games. It certainly is quite subtle, and if that's what gets you going, it may be your cup of tea.

[Edward J. Pollard is a web developer and freelance video game journalist from Southwestern Alberta, Canada. Some people think he posts funny and insightful things to his blog. We think you might be one of them.]

Jun 26, 2007 - 11:59 am | 0 comments
Edward Pollard