Coloma: Deluxe Edition

EvEvanstar4,6

This game features a wheel of action options. Each turn, everyone secretly selects the action they want on their wheel and simultaneously reveals. If players went to one action more than another, the ability of that action area gets halved. The board may make the game look like a point salad, but everything ties together tightly so you can't ignore anything the way you do with point salad. Mechanism-wise the game is very familiar. There's little new and different happening here, but it's a competent remix of familiar mechanisms. The component quality is also very nice. The magnetic wheel in the center of the board is especially cool. However, I found the experience of play to be somewhat frustrating. Since the mechanisms are so intertwined, everyone needs to do every action, which makes it difficult to predict where other players will go. Having several turns in a row stuck with the half action penalty is a major sandbag to whatever plans you had. Guessing what your opponents will do depends a lot on your ability to read their game state from their personal tableau featuring cards and tokens with small, uncolored icons upside down and from across the table. This isn't a problem unique to this game, but frustrating none the less. I also tend to prefer games like this to give me a bonus for guessing right, as opposed to a penalty for guessing wrong, and in this game, while you can look at it either way, it felt more like a punishment than a bonus, since it takes a few setup moves to be ready to resolve the full action, so if you pay for a partial action, it still requires you go through another prep cycle of gathering workers or resources. Additionally, the engine building elements of the game are pretty minimal. Largely you are doing the same gather - build - reset cycles in the final round that you are doing in the initial round. If you've pushed into card development, your cards give small additional bonuses when you take a specific action, but again since you have to diversify your action selection, these payouts will only happen one, maybe two times per round. I don't want to be too negative about the game, I think it's fine. It works, and there are a few different paths through the game. I just haven't managed to get very excited about the process of play. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ☆ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment