Madeira

The Game

The Madeira island group is Portugal's earliest colony during the Age of Exploration. It was a launch pad for Portugese colonisation, the first stop for many expeditions.  The game Madeira is based on this period in history and the role played by this island group. You develop the islands, and use their resources to help Portugal expand its colonial empire. This is a heavy Eurogame. You win by scoring the most points.

This is a complex game, and it's challenging to summarise what it's like. When I first looked at the board and the interface of this computer implementation, I found it overwhelming. I will just touch on a few things that left the biggest impression on me.

There are only two islands on the board, one of which is divided into northern and southern halves. So there are a total of three regions. The regions produce wood, wheat, sugar and wine. Many plantations are initially forests. Only when the trees are felled do they transform into plantations. To harvest resources, you need to place workers onto the forests or plantations, and you need to perform the harvest action. At the end of Round 2, some wheat fields transform to become sugar plantations. In Round 4, some sugar plantations become wine plantations. This is historical flavour integrated into gameplay.

You have workers and you have ships in your personal supply. You deploy them onto different parts the board to do various things, e.g. gaining resources, making money, scoring points, obtaining privileges. There is a cost in deploying workers and ships. Every round you must feed them. Workers eat bread. Ships consume wood - you need to maintain them. If you fail to pay such maintenance fees for workers or ships, you will take penalty in the form of pirate points. At game end, players lose victory points based on their rankings in pirate points. This intricate balance between deploying your pieces and making sure you can afford to do so reminds me of Antiquity and Agricola. You are playing the game on a slippery slope and you need to be careful to stay afloat. The pressure is on right from the start.

The game is played over 5 rounds. At the start of the game and the start of every round, you will pick a scoring tile. Each scoring tile lets you score victory points based on a specific criteria. At the end of the first round you already need to pick one of the two scoring tiles you have at that point to score. Once scored, the tile is discarded. At the end of the third round, you score two of your tiles on hand. At game end, you score all three on hand. These scoring tiles will account for most of your victory points in the game. Your strategy revolves around them. Fighting for player order is important because it determines who gets to pick a scoring tile first. You must watch your opponents' scoring tiles so that you know how to hinder them. Sometimes you want to force your opponents to take scoring tiles which are bad for them. The scoring criteria include spending money for points, merchant ships scoring points, colony ships scoring points, and unused privileges scoring points.

The two sections at the lower right are the colony section and the market section. You get to deploy ships here. To deploy a colony ship you must pay wine (purple). You'll receive some benefit immediately. To deploy a merchant ship, you pay wheat, sugar or wine, and the reward is cold hard cash. During the scoring phase, if you have the right scoring tiles, your ships will score points.

The three rows at the lower left are three cities. When you deploy workers here, you gain bread, money or wood. The more workers you have here, the more resources you will collect. If you have the right scoring tile, presence at cities will score points.

In this screenshot above, those square tiles in the second rows under each player name are the privilege tiles. They have a variety of powers, and they are single-use. Some actions in the game let you reset these tiles, thus allowing you to use them again.

In addition to colony ships, you may deploy workers to the colony section on the right side of the board. These workers become colonists, and they produce resources for you every round. Just don't forget you'll need bread to feed them every round too.

The Play

The grand strategy in Madeira is centred around the six scoring tiles you will claim and score at different times in the game. You must manipulate this and adjust your play to match the scoring tiles you end up with. There are many tactical considerations in the game. Many of the actions in the game are linked with others, and thus have far-reaching implications. This is not an easy game to digest.

Dice are used to create some randomness and conflicting needs. They affect the costs of some actions and the risks of taking pirate points. There is a worker placement element. The number of times a particular action can be taken in a round is limited. If it is important to you, you'd better do it sooner rather than later, especially if you need to do it more than once. There is much decision angst, because there are often a few things you want to do, and you know when you choose one over another, you may not get to do that other one later on. The game has meaningful and difficult decisions, not those superficial ones where you can easily tell which the best option is.

The Thoughts

I wasn't optimistic when I started learning and playing the game. It looked like a mess to me - over convoluted. I was wary whether this was going to be yet another highly complex game jam-packed with mechanisms and rules but no soul. As I played, I gradually discovered the story and the character in the design. I like the sense of urgency and desperation in trying to feed your workers and maintain your ships. It is an intricate balance trying to deploy as many workers and ships as you can, but not too many that it causes more harm than it helps. You have to either afford the maintenance cost, or afford to take the pirate points penalty for not paying the maintenance cost. I also like how wood gets depleted, and how wheat fields turn to sugar plantations and sugar plantations to wine plantations. There is a feeling of living through history and watching an age progress.

The game has high player interaction. Many aspects of the game are tightly integrated, and this creates competition. It is hard to avoid competing. Madeira is for the heavy Eurogamer.