Compania Board Game Review in 3 Minutes #boardgames
Transcript
Campania is an exciting engine builder featuring swift simultaneous play. Here's how it works. There are several actions on the main board. Privately and simultaneously, players use dice to plan how many player cubes to commit to their chosen action. Everyone reveals at the same time and places their planned cubes on the board. Players can perform their planned actions so long as they have sole or shared control. This is when players will receive resources and some actions will let them take another die for future planning or increase the number of player cubes they can take into later rounds. The company phase is the heart of the game when players will build an engine from cards that synergize off of each other. The cool twist here is that cards can be layered in columns making powerful impact from a small action.
What about players who placed cubes but didn't get to perform an action? During the cleanup phase, players who had control are removed from the board and anyone left over gets to leave their cubes for the next round. Round after round this pattern repeats. Planning, revealing, performing actions, and playing cards all with the ultimate goal of making the most money. The first thing to draw me into Campania was this bidding mechanic. I thought it was really cool how losers of the bids could leave their pieces on the board for future rounds. Really clever. I don't think I've seen that before. Uh but truth be told when I played this game for the first time, I hadn't even finished playing it before I was already ordering it on my phone. Uh the reason for that is because everything that I enjoy about an engine builder is just streamlined into simultaneous play. You don't have to wait for other people to do their turns. You get to get build that momentum from having your moves combo off of each other, the sequences of cards that you get to play. I love the simultaneous action in this game.
Uh one drawback on the game is that the game card-wise kind of plays itself. There's not a lot of agency over which strategy you utilize. It is you're going to play the hand that you're dealt. So, that could be considered a drawback, but the thing is, because the game plays with such a great pace, I don't really mind that. I find the game is engaging and fun to play with adults, but I've especially enjoyed playing this with my kids. In fact, I may consider it as one of my top five board game essentials for family board games. It's definitely a five-star game on my shelfie at the perfectboardgame.com. If you want to showcase your board games and reviews like this, you can do it for free. Just go to the perfectboardgame.com, scroll down to the shelfie section, and click to start adding your own games. Don't forget to also check out Compania and vote for it on the shelves where you think it best fits. You can do all of this at the perfectboardgame.com.