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Sunday, June 16, 2013

Cinque Terre : Santiago de Light?

I think its way too light for me...
Recent release Cinque Terre is a light euro about playing cards to pick up goods and then transporting these goods to one of 5 cities to sell them either for points indicated on the dice (Randomly rolled at the start of the game and doesn't change for the rest of the game) or for 1 point if the die corresponding to the good does not appear. Players try to fulfill secret objective cards or the open objective cards to score extra points. Goods sold will be placed onto your player card and if you are the first to fill up one entire row you get extra points as the Most Valuable Merchant for that town. When game ends, player with the most points will win the game.

It is definitely a very light game and quite literally a Pick up goods and then Deliver game. On your turn you have 3 actions to do a variety of things. Play card to pick up a good (if your truck is at the right location), move your truck up to 4 spaces, sell goods at a town (get points) and pick up a card. The game ends when 2 of the goods are empty OR if someone has picked up 5 cards/tiles (objectives and MVM tiles). Each other player will have 1 more action and whoever has the most points will win the game.
Often you are torn between your secret objectives which usually can give u 15++ points up to a max of 25 and the dice rolled. Because you will get points when you sell goods depending on the number rolled, often if you time it right you can get 6 points for each good sold if the dice is right. I ended up collecting quite a fair bit of cards in the beginning then going around the places to buy and sell stuff. In Ticket to Ride, its the tension between have i collected enough cards to start versus what if other players play on the routes I want and block me? Here there isn't so much of such tension. At most you will be rushing to get the MVM awards but in the end they won't score you that many points versus if you aim for the goods that have 6 on the dice roll.
All in all, its a lot of rinse and repeat as you pick up goods, deliver and move along. Components were pretty ok and the art work quite nice colors. Score track though I wish they did not have slanted and slightly irregular widths between them as it made counting and placing our tokens a little bit difficult. (Rialto takes the cake though for lousy score track!). A very light game that could take a bit of time to complete so for the length of time it took, not worth the effort I feel. Try before you buy!

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