What’s Your Game have released some excellent games like Vasco de Gama and last year’s superb (and undeservedly less-known) Oddville.  This year they are releasing Madeira which looks a like a very meaty eurogame with many elements that you need to balance.

In essence, players select a group of action dice and use these on different characters and buildings to perform actions with their workers and ships (visiting fields on islands, colonies, cities and the city watch.  However, this summary completely misses noticing all the many game mechanics and resources to balance.  So, I’ll try to give a more detailed overview of the game which is played over 5 rounds.

At the start of each round, each player selects a row on the Guild Board which gives them 3 dice (the values have been rolled already), plus the player can also select one of the remaining Crown Request tiles in the same row (which can earn points a the end of some rounds).  The row selected also determines turn order for the next phase, plus allows the player to make ready some guild favours (special abilities) if they have any matching ones. Read the rest of this entry »