Viva Catrina Review: Quick Take with Tom Vasel

[music] [music] Viva Katrina is a game about having the Mexican festival here and you are the Day of the Dead Festival and you're just putting up balloons and all sorts of fun things and building a little town and you're doing that by placing tiles um like carcassone style. Here's how it plays. In this game, each player is going to be building their own little festival.

They'll start with a tile in front of them. That tile has a little shop in it with a symbol on it. At the end of the game, the number of different symbols will give you points. On your turn, you're going to draft a tile. Take a tile. It has to be from one of the ends. So, I could take this tile. The next person can take this one, this one, this one, or this one.

And when you take a tile, you'll attach it. You don't have to make the paths connect when you place these. But when you have different thing items, you want them to connect back to your main plaza if possible or they won't score points. So, one of the things that you can collect are balloons. You'll see here that I'm collecting blue balloons.

And when I collect three blue balloons, I'll take the top token here, which is worth five points. If I collect three more and get six, then I'll get 10 points. And these will go down in value as you go down further. Some tiles when you take them just give you points for things at the end of the game.

This, for example, will give me one point for every green balloon that I've gotten. Also, you want to build pedestals. As the game progresses, you might build a small or a large pedestal. Whenever you build a pedestal that matches the size of one of these Camaras, you'll take it and put it there. The small ones are worth three, and the large ones are worth five points.

And then finally, you want to build a path of monarchs. And you want to build a path for these little people here. And those paths need to go back to your main thing. So you'll pick the path with the most butterflies on it that connects back here. And that's going to be two points per butterfly. And the people is one point per person connecting back to your main station.

You will be taking these tiles, like I said, from the end. When they're all gone, that's the end of a round. You'll play a number of rounds equal to the players. After that, whoever has the most points is the winner. This game is fun. There's a few small issues I have with how things look. The little shops are sometimes hard to see and the you know sometimes the the right tile you need is not there.

You are constrained by the four ends. So you have to think what tile am I taking as what I'm opening up to other players. It also goes to six players now is not a six player game but I do find it to be interesting enough beyond that. I think it's fun to build the paths. It's a lighter game. You might want to collect balloons.

You might want to do shops. It feels like there's all kinds of fun things you can do. You want to surround it and get those chimeas out there on the puzzles. And it just looks really bright and cheerful. And all that comes together in a game that not quite, I hate to use the word cozy these days, but it's almost there.

It's just this game of collecting things, building out stuff, building a long butterfly path, and when you're done, you feel like you've accomplished something. And the game is the right length for me too where you do one set per player which means with more players is longer again not playing this with six but I but the two and three player board also has longer rows than the four plus player board.

So the the game it tends to even out. I think the sweet spot here is three four players. But when you're done you look and say that's mine and it's not as I think tense as Carcassone but it alo it also offers kind of a fun neat flavor. It's I was very pleased with this one. I give this one a 7.5 out of 10.

That's Viva Katrina. [music] [music] >> [music]