The Voyages of Marco Polo

EvEvanstar4.6

At the start of this game, you are assigned an incredibly strong player power with the intention that everyone's asymmetric power looks and feels too good, yet with everyone getting an overpowered ability that theoretically the game remains balanced. The tightness of resources and the shortage of rounds will make accomplishing even modest goals, very difficult. Your plans will not work, as your poor dice results and other players beating you to actions you need will inevitably end you one short of whatever it is you needed, be it gold, camels or money. When you take an action needing multiple dice, you resolve for the lowest value in the lot. Then, in order to resolve an action that someone else has chosen before you, you have to pay money equal to the lowest value in your lot of dice. This means that higher values rolled get you bigger results, but you might wind up not being able to afford those results, so having lower values makes your actions cheaper. The game has an extremely high amount of variation. There are lots of player powers, all different, the city spaces get populated with randomize cards and there are enough of those that you might not see the same card for many games, and you can randomize the positions of the different income city abilities, to make it so that no path is quite the same twice. The game is an intriguing, but also often frustrating puzzle that I can't decide if I love or hate. :star: Art, Iconography and components functional :star: Clever or interesting mechanisms :star: Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players :star: Multiple plays stay interesting :nostar: Low or mitigatable luck elements :star::star::star::nostar::nostar: Raw enjoyment

Ferran A Salesstar6.0

Great game. Bought Marco Polo 2 because after a few games I noticed some flaws in it. Still one of the best Luciani's games by farr

Danielstar7.0

4