Game 50: Karuba

Whew!  Fifty games from our shelves so far!  Karuba is awesome, and so it's a good one to serve as a milestone game.  Caleb gave it to me last year for Christmas, and we have played it quite a bit since then.  I like the story factor of this game - explorers making their way through the jungle to lost pyramid temples to find treasure and artifacts.  It's got good toy value too, as you get to pick up crystal and gold tokens as you journey rather than just keeping track of points abstractly.

 To begin the game you place explorers on coastal tiles and temples on jungle tiles.  You then use tiles to build a path through the jungle to get your explorers to their temple (blue explorer to blue temple, yellow to yellow, etc.).  The first player to get an explorer of a given color to a pyramid temple of that color finds the move valuable artifact of that color; the second person whose explorer makes it to the pyramid temple of that color gets the second most valuable artifact, and so on.

 I have to admit that a few months back I got a tiny bit bored with this game, because I thought we had "solved" it.  It seemed there was one strategy that worked best EVERY time, so for about three games in a row everyone just went for that strategy  .  .  .  boring!  BUT because we experienced that we have naturally begun to guard against it by choosing the starting positions a little differently, and last night's game was a complete surprise to me.  Because of wisely chosen starting placements and the way in which the randomly-drawn tiles came up I found myself very challenged and not at all able to go with the strategy I'd seen work so effectively before.

Tiles serve two purposes: building paths and determining movement.  You have to think carefully about timing and possibilities because the way you move your explorer is to discard a tile rather than placing it.  You then move up to the number of path exit points on that tile.  You have a limited number of tiles of each configuration, so you want to think carefully to make sure you can finish your paths, but you also need to think about when to start discarding tiles in order to get your explorers moving since the first explorer to any given temple is the one that gets the highest point value artifact.

Each player has his own board and each has the same set up, so winning is totally a matter of making better choices with your tiles and your timing than other players have made.  In other words, winning is not a matter of chance; it is all on you to play well!

This game has so much going for it - nice design, good story element, a bit of randomness yet a lot of strategy.  It is an excellent game that is definitely not gathering dust on the shelf.   I'll end with a shout out to the Gerdes family who introduced us to this game and who are the reason it ended up on my Christmas list for last year!