So I’ve gotten two games of Archipelago in in the last couple of weeks, one short and one medium- the game has three sets of objective cards for different game lengths (though all three sets can be used with any number of players- so you can still play the ‘short’ game with five players or a ‘long’ game with two).
The game is by Chris Bollinger, of Dungeon Twister and Earth Reborn fame, and is built around a pretty standard worker-placement core. The twists it introduces are map exploration (always a favorite of mine) and a ‘semi co-op’ mechanic.
Map exploration is done very well, and reminds me a bit of an old two-player Kosmos game called Hellas- it produces new terrain to exploit in a realistic and not entirely risk-free way. I like it.
The semi-co-op bit is where things get interesting, and what really ties the theme together. First, everyone is dealt a secret objective card at the beginning of the game. This has two pieces of information on it that are never shown to the other players. The first is a game-end condition- there’s only one baked into the game, and that’s the ‘everyone loses’ mechanic- more on that in a minute. So only you will know that the game will end if there have been four towns built, for example- you check everyone’s at the end of each turn. However, your game-end condition probably won’t have anything to do with the scoring condition on the card. So even if you know the game ends with four towns being built, your card also tells you that everyone will be scoring VPs for most money- also a fact only you will know. So having scoring secrets and not scoring until the game ends, which is also variable, keeps anyone from throwing the game if they think they’re in last place.
So how does ‘everyone lose’? This is the cool mechanic that really ties every decision in the game together. See, the game keeps track of lots of different resources- various kinds of goods on both local and export markets, the total working population of the Archipelago, the total ‘idle’ population of the Archipelago, the level of civil unrest- and they’re all interrelated in deep yet simple to follow ways. For example, if there’s too much surplus food (incidentally driving the price down), the population will go up. As the population rises, the number of idle workers rises, and as the number of idle workers rises, the rebellion grows as they have nothing better to do with their time. There’s two ways to solve this problem- hire the workers into the general population (thus increasing it, which has problems of it’s own), or build churches and other things that pacify and lower the unrest -but building churches takes resources and actions you could spend doing other, more useful, things. If the unrest level passes the population level, they rebel and kick the colonists out, and everyone loses, unless you drew what is essentially the Traitor secret objective, and then you win solely (another reason to not throw the game if you think you’re losing- there’s a chance you could be handing real victory to another player).
The theme is great, and very well-realized in spite of the bog-standard euro mechanics. There are a number of very simple systems that reinforce this theme well. The short, 3-player learning game we played took a couple hours to walk through, and we finished with a fairly narrow point spread. The second, 5-player Medium game was crazy and tense, constantly trying to balance all the various things to keep us ahead of the unrest. We did well for quite a while, but then got his with a big bout of unrest that we just couldn’t handle- too many players had hired too many people, driving the population up, and when the demand for food came, we didn’t have it to feed them, so they revolted and we lost. Both games were great, though, and we’re all eager to play again.
