Amerigo Board Game Review

Year Published: 2013

Players: 2-4

Playing Time: 90 Minutes

I’m not a big fan of designer Stefan Feld’s board game catalog. Let’s get that out of the way.

Don’t get me wrong, I bear him no ill will, and see the genius inherent in many of his designs. It’s just that his design sensibilities don’t often match well with my play sensibilities. He generally shuns direct player interaction and instead shunts the action to personal play areas that turn games into quiet, multi-layered mechanical puzzles. Many love this style of game, but they lack a certain punch (literally and figuratively) for me.

So I don’t mind plenty of Feld games, and even like a few of them a bit. But none have really moved my meter, so to speak, in terms of listing games that I truly enjoy.

Amerigo…might be the exception to that.

It’s certainly an easy pick for “my favorite Feld.” Not a monumental feat in my world, granted, but a good starting point.

The game features a variable amount of action points to complete one of a handful of actions, which correspond to your movement, exploration and settling of various islands on the game’s main play area. Points are awarded for numerous actions and settlements, making it a race for various bonuses and control of areas.

The Setting

I get that there’s supposed to be a setting, but it’s as much an afterthought as anything else. Vaguely explorative, vaguely colonial. You’re sailing around a series of islands, establishing outposts and settling them, all for victory points.

There are those who dislike colonial-themed games, and I can’t really fault their position. It’s potentially problematic to glorify, and often unnecessary when other settings would suffice. But here, to my eye, no strong sense of setting emerges. It’s colonialist in the same way that a candy cigarette is a dangerous drug. So I can aim no personal vitriol toward it.

Whatever is on the official game blurb or box will be the closest you get to a well-realized setting. If you’re going to be interested in the game, it will be for the game itself, not its aesthetic or thematic trappings.

The Theme

I separate this from Setting because, while these can be kinda separated in many games, here they’re practically different entities altogether.

I’d call the theme a race to settle the game’s areas. It’s a race against the round clock, and against your fellow players for the same resources, the same islands, the same ability and goods tokens. This is the feeling that will be realized (or not) depending on the game’s execution.

It’s All About the Tower

There are a bunch of possible actions, but they’re all dictated semi-randomly by a tower that eats up cubes and spits…some of them out. Importantly, it usually won’t chuck all of them to the bottom. Several will get stuck in its inner workings.

So let’s say it’s time for the Green cubes to be hurled into the tower, and you dump 6 of them into it. The tower might spit back 4 greens, 2 black, 1 yellow, and 1 white.

Now, you can perform an action that corresponds to any of those colors, with a “power” of the most-represented cube. In this example, it would be four possible actions (actions represented by green, black, yellow and white), with a power of four (the total of green cubes).

So maybe you have four buying power in one of the markets, or your ships can move four spaces.

In this way, variance is added to each turn and each round. And some games will feel the sting of very few cubes of a particular color.

Because on occasion the tower will frown upon you, and maybe you’ll have a maximum power of two. Or perhaps only a single color will drop down, giving you no choice of what action to pick. Other times, three colors whose actions you want to take will appear all at once. Still yet, you’ll sometimes know that there’s a final blue cube (or whatever) trapped in the tower, and with your earlier actions in a round, you have to decide whether or not to gamble that it will drop down at some point or not.

What this does is threefold:

1. It removes scripted play, which is something I dislike about some Euros. There won’t be strategy discussions of what your first handful of actions should be to optimize your early game, because games won’t see the same distribution of cubes.
2. It introduces press-your-luck and/or risk tolerance considerations. There will be times when a single cube is failing to materialize that would make your life much easier. Whether or not you anticipate it dropping or staying up is a delightful exercise in player psychology.
3. The distribution of cubes (either on the current turn or in those yet to come) introduces lots of opportunities to anticipate opponent actions, and adjust accordingly.

We’re going to talk more about that last one in this next section.

What Does Interaction Mean?

Interaction in games means many things to many people. And 99% of competitive games have some form of interaction.

But it’s also true to say that there are degrees of these things, and a game with only cursory levels of engagement won’t feel very interactive.

So when I say Amerigo is pleasantly interactive, I’m not just talking about someone else taking the card or tile that you were hoping to utilize on your next turn. There’s some of that here, but it’s not the focal point.

But rather, it’s that you’re all on the same play space (the islands), and they will quickly fill up, leaving less and less real estate. You can visibly see your opportunities for points shrinking methodically. You can see the special abilities in the market area being snatched up prior to your turn, forcing you to either take a useless ability or pivot to another action type.

But you can also anticipate that problem, and maneuver to take the good one(s) early, so that your opponents have that same frustrating decision later on.

Nothing’s worse (see also: glorious) in the game than seeing someone spend some extra coins to unexpectedly dock on your island – YOUR island – and start building on it before your plans for it come to fruition. Or doing the same to them.

This is what a lot of Feld games are missing for those of us who crave puzzles that are interpersonal as much as they’re mechanical. I don’t just want to take the tile you were eyeing. I want to take it, then use it to steal the damn island out from underneath you and build it to a prosperous state, while you watch dumbfounded in anger. Or congratulate you when you do the same to me.

The Trappings of the Genre

To be clear, this is still a point-salad, essentially themeless Euro-style game. The mechanical trappings of a thinky Eurogame are all there, and you can’t trip over yourself in the game without earning a fair number of victory points.

I could do with a little more evocative imagery, just as I could do without the explosion of points. I don’t feel the endorphin rush of a 30-point turn, because I’ve learned by now just how illusory such rushes tend to be by the end of the game.

To be fair, there are some attempts to make the game more visceral than Feld’s designs tend to be. Pirates will attack, for example. Or rather, you’ll flip over tokens that have numbers on them, and cumulatively they represent the pirates’ attack power at the end of each round.

Which is kind of my criticism. My ideal version of this game probably sees the “load cannons” action replaced with literal pirate ships on the board that you maneuver into miserable positions for your opponents. And similar permutations on various other mechanics, just brought to life in slightly more intuitive, engaging ways.

Instead, we buy and flip chips. It’s the sanitized version of ideas that could have much more bite to them.

Criticizing a Feld game for being, well, a Feld game feels a little bit like signing up for a horse ride and complaining that it’s not a boat ride. So I say all of this with a healthy sense of perspective. Feld has a style and an audience, and these elements are catered well to that audience. Those who play Feldian games are used to flipping tiles for victory points, and generally won’t prefer to shoot cannons at rival ships to blow them out of the water.

If you’re not in that demographic, though, some of the decisions – both aesthetic and mechanical – will feel a bit bland.

Solving the Riddle – Amerigo Conclusions

Despite that, Amerigo is a game I really enjoy. And it’s because of those two elements: the tower and the interaction, which separate it from many others.

The tower makes the game feel more like an enigmatic riddle that’s different every time, rather than an opportunity to show off how well you know how to build an efficient engine in the game. The answer is going to shift, but the answer will always still be there somewhere. So it’s an ongoing lesson in adaptability of strategies and tactics. This, along with some meaningful level of interaction with other players, is how you get me to appreciate a Eurogame design.

So there are elements that prevent Amerigo’s “good” from being “great” to my eyes. But still, it’s rather good, and will satisfy the audience it was intended for, while also – if I’m any indication – pull in some new fans who wouldn’t have initially expected to enjoy Amerigo so much, but were pleasantly surprised that they did.