Santa Maria

The Game

Santa Maria, first published in 2017, was nominated for several international awards in 2017 and 2018. It did not catch my attention then, because it looked like yet another Eurogame about developing your colony. How boring can these Eurogame publishers get? Allen bought a second-hand copy of the game, and asked me to read the rules. And boy now I'm glad I had the opportunity to give it a go. 

Santa Maria is a game about developing your colony (sorry). Everyone has a 6x6 grid on their player board. You start with some buildings and you will build more throughout the game. Buildings let you collect resources and do other things. You use dice in the game to activate buildings in numbered rows or columns. As you construct more buildings you will collect more resources and do more things as you activate your rows and columns. Resources can be shipped for points. Some buildings let you convert resources to points. At the end of the game you also score points based on how well you have developed your colony.

This is your player board. The game is played over three rounds. Every round you will be able to draft three white dice from a central pool to activate columns on your board. Activating a column means activating every building which does something from top to bottom (e.g. produce resources, ship resources, train conquistadors, train monks). After you activate a column, the die used is placed atop the last building activated, making it unavailable for the rest of the round. Rows are activated in the same way, but by using blue dice. You start the game with only one blue die, and you get more when you do some monk training.   

Taking and using a die is only one of the actions you can perform. On your turn, you may also choose to spend resources to buy two-square or three-square tiles to add to your colony. These tiles have buildings, roads and terrain. The buildings give you more abilities, and the other aspects of the tiles may also help you fulfil end-game scoring criteria. On your turn you may spend money to activate a single building. When buildings are activated this way, the money spent is placed onto the building, disabling it for the rest of the round. 

This is the main board. Near the top of this photo you can see yellow four shipping order tiles. When you perform a shipping action, you fulfil one of these orders and claim the tile, placing it next to your player board. Tiles claimed this way give you benefits when you retire from a round. 

There are two tracks on the main board, the conquistador track and the monk track. Some buildings let you advance your markers on these tracks. Advancing on the conquistador track gives you gold (a valuable resource which can be used as a wild resource) and allows you to score points at the end of a round if you do better than your opponents. Advancing on the monk track gives you blue dice and monks. Monks can be used to claim special abilities and activate additional scoring criteria for yourself. 

The six monk-related tiles along the top edge of the main board are randomised every game. Three of them are special abilities which you can claim using your monks, and the other three are additional scoring conditions you can qualify yourself for. There is some competition for these spots. The first player to claim a spot gets it for free, but subsequent players must pay the early birds. 

You will gradually run out of things you can do in a round, and you will eventually want to retire from the round. There are five retirement actions. These are benefits you claim when you retire. Each of these spots can only be claimed by one player, so if you want a particular spot, you may want to be first to retire from a round. The positions of these five retirement actions also determine the turn order for the next round. 

You'll probably know the drill by now. Highest scorer after three rounds wins the game. Here are the various ways you score points. Some actions during the game will get you victory point tokens. The shipping you do (i.e. fulfilling contracts) gives you points. Sets of different ships give you points. Complete rows and columns in your colony give you points. There are three monk actions which may allow you to score points based on how you have developed your colony, for example in our game every row or column with all four terrain types scores 3 points, and we could score up to 12 points using this monk tile. 

The Play

Now so far, from all that description above, this sounds exactly like yet another multiple-ways-to-score-points, individual-player-board-development, resource-generation-and-conversion, contract-fulfilling Eurogame. And I would say yes, all these are pretty accurate descriptions of Santa Maria. This sounds exactly like a game I wouldn't enjoy, because I have played too many games just like this. However, to my surprise, I greatly enjoyed the game. The game doesn't have any particularly ground-breaking idea. It does have some interesting ideas, and they are implemented and balanced well. I like how the various subsystems in the game are closely linked. They all affect one another. I like that there are many things you can do, but you can't quite do them all. You are kept busy and engaged enough trying to fully utilise the resources you have. 

Generally I know I should buy tiles and lay them on my board before I use dice to activate my rows and columns, because then I will be able to use the buildings on those newly laid tiles. However if I don't have the resources to buy the tiles themselves, then I need to active some rows or columns first. I know I should get my second and third blue dice as soon as possible, so that I will have more actions every round. That means I need to advance on my monk track, which in turn means I need to activate rows with monk actions. When taking a monk action, you may pay one grain to advance an extra step on the monk track. If you want to be efficient, you want to make sure you always have spare grain. Then this means you need to active rows to take grain first. So many things you want to do, but you can't do everything at once. You have to plan carefully the order of taking actions. 

In our game I spent much effort working towards the monk tiles which were additional scoring criteria. I was deliberate in trying to fulfil those criteria as I developed my colony. This was a tricky puzzle because I tried to fulfil multiple criteria at the same time. While juggling these, I also needed to be aware of the dice available for the round, and placed tiles in rows I could activate, so that I made as much use of those tiles as I could. So you can see how the many elements in the game are closely linked. 

This was my colony at the end of the game. I had completely filled the board! That was immensely satisfying. My life work was done! 

The Thoughts

In many ways Santa Maria feels like an old school Eurogame. There are many familiar elements. The theme is certainly an overused one. The art style too. One thing that I admire is how well the graphic design is done. I mean in terms of useability and helping players understand how the game works. This makes learning and playing the game a joy. It almost feels like I'm playing the game on a reference sheet. The visual reminders really help. 

I like how the various mechanisms in the game are tightly integrated. The game might have started with the row activation and tile laying aspects as the core, and other aspects were added to complete the game, but these other mechanisms blend in well. It is a fun puzzle working out the series of actions you want to take. The game is a little multiplayer solitaire. You are developing your own board and don't directly attack your opponents. However there are still many elements where you compete - the common pool of white dice, the monk spots, the conquistador track, shipping, and the tiles available to be purchased every round. But yes, this is the pretty Eurogame type of player interaction. 

Santa Maria is an underappreciated gem. I highly recommended it.