East India Companies, Cuba, Bombay Reviews - Chairman of the Board

hey everybody today I'm taking a look at three board games all of these games have some kind of supply and demand mechanism involved now the three games I'm talking about are Cuba we have Bombay and we also have East India companies and these range quite um quite a lot in terms of when they were released before I get to my reviews of these games I want to give a shout out to the show's sponsor keyander.co.uk who are my go-to online retailer and if you use the link in my show notes or the QR code then you can get a five percent off your first order okay so let's start with the simplest of the three this is Bombay by estari games uh two to five players 30 to 60 Minutes to play this is a more traditional pickup and deliver Style game as you will be moving your elephant piece around this map try to deliver these cubes to their matching temples based on a supply and demand mechanism the longer and a certain type of resource is neglected they'll go to the top of the list here and be worth more money to that delivering person now it uses an action point system where I believe you have three actions on your term which you can use to move your elephants and if you land on top of a hill that'll cost you an extra action point and again you can pick up the different Goods that you'll need to deliver to the temples and you can even set up these little outposts and certain Junctions in order to get some passive income as other players travel through that location which I thought was quite a nice little touch now this is very simple it just definitely doesn't overdo that pick up and deliver mechanism that is what all this game is about and it's almost like a a my first pick up and deliver game if you want to put it that way a very lovely um aesthetic here wonderful production and it really does look nice on the table and as I said it's a nice um way to maybe introduce pickup deliver and logistics for younger children or you know less experienced gamers now I do feel like this game was pretty much on the rails and the margins between what you get for you know delivering a good brilliant demand and not being in demand were quite small and incremental so it wasn't a game with huge exciting moments or you know um big swings of Point scoring it was very much again very small margins very incremental and bitty um in that respect but it was nice it flows it flows nicely it doesn't take too long as I said the table presence is nice um but I think you're gonna outgrow this one pretty quickly um if you play a lot of games um as I said probably more appropriate for younger families and stuff like that because there is enough game going on here in order to prioritize things and try to deliver Goods just before your opponents do to get that extra point or two but yeah if you are an experienced gamer I think this one isn't going to really quite cut the mustard for you I'm despite looking so nice the one that I can't really recommend at least for get experienced Gamers but still it does what it does well and it's a good example of a very simple pickup and deliver game next up we have East India companies this is a two to four player game that takes 90 to 120 Minutes to play um this is more of your traditional Euro as you are essentially trying to manage your Fleet of ships in order in order to travel the world get some resources and sell them to the market when the market is hot there are quite a few things going on in this game and I do think this game could have benefited from editing some of those things um it's quite procedural in the way that it plays out as you're going from face to face to face and I think the flow is kind of disrupted because of that now the game does use this kind of worker placement mechanism as you're placing your meeples on these different characters here and which will allow you to buy new ships that allow you to increase your dockyard those kind of things and I thought this was kind of surplus to requirements because you generally go through the same motions and end up at the same point anyway it's just which already want to do it in so I thought that was kind of tacked on and the game also has this investment system where you can actually invest in other players and buy stocks and shares in other players abilities basically um and for me again I don't think that was executed terribly well and I thought sometimes the game was trying to be a bit too clever for its own good and that didn't really help with the overall experience now the game does use um a system where you are going to be blind bidding with the ships you've had or you know built up throughout the game and placing them on these different locations in order to get the goods and then based on the initiative order or the speed of those ships you're going to be you know redepositing it back to the market based on this quite a dynamic Market as not only with these cards remove um basically remove goods from the markets um in a fixed way but you'll also be rolling these dice which will kind of add or subtract additional resources from the market making either the more expensive or cheaper and I thought that was a bit too a bit too strong of a factor in the game because it's something like the faster ships you're always going to get those extra um you're going to get the initiative in order to sell back to the market when the goods are worth more money and I understand that is the kind of um the Crux of the game but I didn't really find it terribly exciting and I didn't really think that the again incremental way of scoring was that significant and it didn't have these big moments at all and this game actually just reminded me of a game called Francis Drake which is quite similar in a lot of ways where you are using a blind bidding system um and again I think this game suffers a lot of the same fate as Francis Drake does because this one doesn't really have any kind of uh engine building it doesn't really escalate or Crescendo at all and considering this is like a two-hour game I think because there is no fraud momentum if it was quite stagnant and it does outstate its welcome now again this is a game I really wanted to like because you know I like the theming I like the look of the game um and I like a lot of the concepts here but I think the execution didn't quite work for me um and that was a shame really because I went I was quite excited to play it now again it does have some redeeming features but because there are so many great Euros out there now I did this one quite holds up because it doesn't flow too nicely yet it takes too long and it could have benefited from some engine building mechanism and being embedded in the game so for that reason I can't really recommend uh East India companies and the final game I'm talking about today is Cuba by Michael renick and Stefan Statler at Rio Grande games this one it takes around you know again 90 to 120 Minutes to play the box at 75 to 120 Minutes um this one accommodates two to five players now this is one of the nicest looking board games I've ever played and let's start off on a positive note uh very attractive I think it's Michael Manziel artwork really does look fantastic has a traditional look but still very beautiful now this is a card driven Euro as you have a hand of these character cards um and you're going to be playing four out of the five cards on each of the rounds now they all are pretty simple in their own right one of them will allow you to harvest resources from these boards here so you'll basically be placing your meeple down and for every resource in that row or column where your meeple is you will harvest basically so if you are familiar with the game called Santa Maria and there's quite a similar mechanism in that one which I really like I like that especially when it comes to the next ability which is to buy these buildings which will give you kind of conversion trees um different kind of rule breaking abilities and so on and I like the fact that when you buy these buildings they'll actually go on your player boards and therefore cover up a resource that you would have been able to harvest but that ties into the next ability which would be to use a character to activate the buildings in a row or columns you are constantly kind of changing your resource building engine to a building using engine and which I thought was a really nice touch and the pacing of the game is really good because I think it's only like five rounds in the game or something so that kind of gradual turning from resources to buildings Works nicely and it doesn't seem to um have that sticky moment where you can't get resources anymore so you need to be quite careful about what you need and know when to convert them into points at AKA buildings and we also have this Dynamic marker on the board here um again supply and demand and more resources there are there the um the cheaper they'll be the fewer there are there the more expensive they'll be and you can sell it to the market at a better profit I'm essentially what you're trying to do is you are trying to gain these resources um then you are trying to again build the buildings you're trying to send them to the ships that dock on the island um and so each ship has a certain demand of a certain type of resources um and the longer they are in this dock the more points are going to be worth but there is this kind of chicken mechanism where you don't want to wait too long because your opponents will get there before you do and therefore they will steal that slot completely so you want to be making sure that you strike when the iron is hot and get those goods sold uh this game also has a very cool mechanism where the character that you don't use in the round will have a certain amount of voting points or voting power which you'll use to basically manipulate the gain state so each round you're gonna have these four cars that you'll be trying to bring into power to suit you one of them will be a taxes and where you're gonna have to give up a certain amount of money one of them is going to be a certain resource you're going to have to give up and if you give them up you're going to get some points if you give them both up you'll get some extra points one of them is going to be a scoring category so it might say um you know you'll score a point for every building you've built and of course you want to manipulate that to benefit you and not benefit the other players and there's even a game breaking ability as well and which will completely um you know throw the rules on its head um this is a very polished Euro I think there's not really much I can criticize about it I think it works extremely well it's a lot of fun um but my main issue with it is that once you've seen it you've kind of seen it there isn't really much legs here at all there's no incentive to come back to it after you've played it I think you can pretty much experience the whole game after a couple of plays which you know you do want some legs in these games you want some reason to come back to it and I don't think this game did that very well now I understand there is quite a highly rated expansion for the game and which adds a lot more variety which I think would probably help this game massively now I haven't played it at all so I can't testify how good that expansion is but I think that's an isolated game I think you'll enjoy it for your initial plays but you're going to be quickly wanting to move on to something else despite how well it plays how smoothly it plays and how many good decisions there are to be made here there's even some additional touches that I didn't mention such as not being able to um to carry certain resources from round to round unless you pretty much spend your whole time to use a resource um the warehouse action to send your resources into safety to make sure you can use them in future rounds but loads of things that I like about this one but I kind of felt like I was done once I'd finished playing it and um again I was ready to um you know move on I suppose which is um yeah a bit of a shame but it's a difficult game to rate because again as a piece of Designing um you know or a gaming game design example is fantastic you know this should be very I'm happy with where this game turned out but I think that maybe the reason this game isn't really in the Zeitgeist Now isn't really being talked about is for that lack of replayability so if there's that reason it's a it's a very near Miss but I couldn't really recommend it because I didn't think I'd be on your show for very long at all so that is Cuba so that concludes the video hopefully you have enjoyed it and sadly nothing here I can wholeheartedly recommend but they all definitely have their strengths and you know some weaknesses um but I think again with a lot of games out there these ones don't quite cut the mustard um despite having some redeeming features now if you have enjoyed the video please be sure to hit like And subscribe to my channel and check out my other content too a bit of everybody else I'll see you next time on chairman of the board bye-bye