Coimbra

Plays: 3Px1.

The Game

Coimbra is the fourth largest city of Portugal. The game Coimbra brings us back to the glory days of Portugal during the age of discovery. You are great houses of the city competing for prestige. You do so by influencing important personages. Some are swayed by money, others support you because you offer military protection. The game is played over four rounds, after which the player with the most victory points wins.

The game board is divided into four sections. The most important one is on the left - the bidding area. This is where you compete to win over the various personages. The second most important section is on the right. These are the four influence tracks - military, finance, religion, academic. As you increase your influence, you improve your capabilities. At game end, you also score points for how your position compares to others on each track. The central section of the board is the pilgrims map. The bottom section is for voyages you can invest in.

This is the player board. The top half is for tracking two currencies you have in the game - guards and money. The bottom half shows the sequence of phases of a game round, and also end game scoring conditions. Those three square items in the middle are die holders. Each fits exactly one die.

The core mechanism in Coimbra is the bidding system through which players fight for these favour tiles (top row) and character cards (other three rows). The character cards are refreshed every round. Any leftovers are discarded. The card deck has just enough for four rounds. The favour tiles and character cards give various benefits. Favour tiles won are yours for the current round only. Character cards won belong to you till game end. Some characters give one-time benefits, some grant permanent abilities, and some let you score points at game end.

At the start of a round, the start player rolls a bunch of dice in different colours. Then everyone takes turns claiming one die and using it to bid for an item. We did a three player game, so some die tiles are placed in the bidding area to represent a dummy player. These die tiles affect how the human players claim items. In the bidding phase, the colours of the dice do not matter. They only matter in a later phase. However you do already have to consider them now. Each time you claim a die, you fit it into one of your die holders, and then place it into a row where you want to claim an item. Dice placed form a queue. When fighting for favour tiles, smaller numbers go first; when fighting for character cards, higher numbers go first. Favour tiles cost nothing, but character cards cost either guards or money. The price you pay depends on the die you use. If you use a high valued die, you get to pick a card earlier, but you also have to pay more.

The dummy player claims a card too when its turn comes. It always goes for the highest valued card remaining. If your die is behind the dummy player die, you will have fewer choices by the time your turn comes.

These are the favour tiles. The crown icons are for determining player order for the next round. That little square frame can be put onto your own die to increase its value by three. So this can change things when you resolve the remaining bidding. Things are not set in stone yet after all players have claimed and placed dice. This little die modifier can still mess up your plans.

It is possible to have more than four dice in the same row. In this situation, most likely the 5th guy will get nothing. How did we get into such a situation in the photo above? It was not that the red player saw this row already being occupied by four dice, and still picked a value-2 die to queue at the 5th position. The red player had placed the value-2 die earlier, and had not expected the competition to be so fierce. Other players had claimed higher valued dice and inserted themselves in front of the red player in the queue.

These two are starting cards. Everyone gets two, and they create different starting advantages among the players. They work in a similar way as regular character cards. The numbers on the left let you advance your marker on the influence tracks. This card on the left moves you two steps on the religion influence track. The card on the right moves you one step on the finance influence track. The icons at the bottom indicate other benefits. The card on the left gives you one guard and moves your pilgrim one step. The card on the right gives you a discount whenever executing Phase C of a round. When you pay for a character using guards, you enjoy a discount.

If you look closely, you can see some cards on the right have small tiles with crowns. These will help you compete for turn order. They augment the values of the cards. The card at the top left has an exclamation mark. This means it scores points at game end. This particular card scores points based on your position on the finance influence track.

Everyone has one pilgrim. These pilgrims start off from Coimbra at the centre of the map, and journey to various cities and towns. Each time your pilgrim arrives at a new location, you place your marker and enjoy the benefit of the location. There is no blocking. The same location can be visited by multiple players.

After you complete the bidding phase and claim all the favours and characters, the dice you have claimed and used this round will be used for another purpose - income. Now the colours of the dice matter, and not the values. The die colours match the four influence tracks. For each die, you collect income from the corresponding influence track, based on your position on the track. Grey dice give you guards (military influence track). Orange dice give you money (finance influence track). Purple dice move your pilgrim (religion influence track). Green dice give you victory points (academic influence track). The white die is a joker, you can choose which influence track to take income from. When picking dice at the bidding stage, you already need to consider the colour in preparation for the income phase.

The final phase of a round is the voyages phase. You have the option to invest in one voyage. Voyages let you score points at game end based on specific criteria. The voyage to Malacca (left) costs 7 guards. It gives you 2VP per religion character card you have. The voyage to Ceuta (right) costs 8 guards. It gives you 1VP per location not visited by your pilgrim. If you don't plan to use your pilgrim much, this may be a good investment.

After the fourth round, you do game end scoring, and highest scorer wins.

The Play

I played Coimbra when Han was in town. We played together with Allen. All of us were new to the game.

Among the four influence tracks, you need to decide to focus on one or two. It is hard to do well in all four, and it will likely be inefficient too. At game end, at every influence track you need to compare your position against other players. If you try to win everywhere, you may end up losing everywhere. If you have chosen to focus on a particular area, you will become strong in this area, and it is best that you make use of your strength. E.g. if you are strong in the finance area, you will want to use the orange dice more, because each time you take income, you will earn a lot. You will also tend to prefer to buy characters with money (as opposed to guards), since you have a lot of money. Deciding which areas to focus on depends on what your opponents do. If they all ignore a particular area, you may want to jump in because there is no competition.

The bidding mechanism is the core mechanism, but it is already the execution stage of your strategy. You already need to decide on a direction before you execute. Of course during execution, the behaviour of your opponents may cause you to change tack.

Player interaction is mainly in the bidding, i.e. competing for favours and characters. There is no blocking in the locations being visited by pilgrims or in the voyages. You need to compete in the four influence tracks, and mostly this boils down to the characters you fight for during bidding. Coimbra has engine-building. As you improve your capability, you want to fully utilise it to help you do more and achieve more. It is not necessary to boost your weaker areas. You just need to maintain a minimum capacity so that these areas don't slow you down.

Along the edges of the player board you can see the letter C, the letter E, the exclamation mark and the lightning symbol. These are suggested positions to place your cards. C and E are two phases of a round which can be augmented by character cards. In the exclamation mark area you can put all the cards which score points at game end. Lightning symbol cards all give immediate benefits. Once used, they don't give you anything else. So you can put them all to the side. They may still help other cards score points at game end.

I was the religious guy, aiming to go for purple as much as possible, so I claimed this card at the bottom. At game end it would score points for religion influence level.

Since I was the holy man, my pilgrim received plenty of moves. I was blue, and my pilgrim had covered 6 locations by this time. The benefits at the locations are randomly set up at the start of every game.

Voyages are open to all and there is no limit to how many players may invest in a voyage. This voyage card on the left scores points based on how many locations your pilgrim visits. Since my pilgrim was very active, I (blue) invested in this voyage card.

These were my characters at game end. I had two exclamation mark characters who scored points at game end. The one on the right scored points based on my religion influence level, and I scored the full 10VP. The one on the left let me score another green card, which meant I scored 10VP from it too. Fantastic deal!

The Thoughts

Coimbra is a typical point-scoring Eurogame, of medium-to-high complexity. It has some engine-building. The player interaction is mostly in the bidding mechanism where you compete for character cards and favour tiles. There are some small tactics you get to apply. When picking a die, you need to consider both colour and value, you need to consider what your opponents will go for. Players will tend to diverge, so different items will likely have different values to different people. This affects how players value the dice. The bidding mechanism doesn't seem that complex, but it has some clever twists. Generally playing this game is a comfortable experience. You are steadily building your own engine. You are progressing. There is no blocking in the pilgrimage or in the voyages. There are few direct attacks. Peace!

I giggled when I saw this card. Those who know Cantonese will know what I mean. This is a real place!