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Embarcadero (Kickstarter – Maritime Mogul Pledge)
60m - 90m
1 - 4 Players
Ages 12+
Hand management games are games with cards in them that reward players for playing the cards in certain sequences or groups. The optimal sequence/grouping may vary, depending on board position, cards held and cards played by opponents. Managing your hand means gaining the most value out of available cards under given circumstances. Cards often have multiple uses in the game, further obfuscating an "optimal" sequence.
Hand Management
Tile Placement games feature placing a piece to score VPs, with the amount often based on adjacent pieces or pieces in the same group/cluster, and keying off non-spatial properties like color, "feature completion", cluster size etc.
Tile Placement
American West
45.00
€
30 day low:
Out of stock
Search for:
Kickstarter – Gamefound
Board Games
Strategy
Family and Children
Party
Adult
Thematic
Ελληνικα Παιχνιδια
LCG
Arkham Horror: The Card Game
Marvel Champions: The Card Game
The Lord of The Rings: The Card Game
RPGs
D & D
Pathfinder
Gamebooks
Others
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Sleeves
Sapphire Sleeves
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ILoseAtLife
Embarcadero's gameplay of building ships and buildings on top of them feels unique and interesting. Players want to compete for wharf space, but building high also can yield big points. In my opinion, the randomness of the cards has too much influence on the outcome of the game.
realityfoible
Embarcadero's hand management brilliant. You start with 5 cards. Each turn you play one, buy a new one, and discard one for use next round. Naturally, each round is 5 actions. It's a simple, smooth system that gives players a lot of control over their turns and offers flexibility in setting up future strategies. That's about where my fondness for Embarcadero ends though. The area control building at the heart of the game does absolutely nothing for me. I found it underwhelming and full of unintuitive tiny rules that lead to constant confusion and frustration. Success in the game is heavily impacted by the randomness of scoring objectives, which almost always benefit one player at the table above all others. In one play the scoring objectives for the first two turns cared about structures and purple buildings, both of which the Hotelier has massive advantages and synergies with. Compounding the problem, red cards offer huge point swings for accomplishing specific things, but are randomly dealt about mid-way through the game. This has the impact of giving huge benefits to players who just happened to already have what the card needs, while starving out players too entrenched in a pre-existing strategy to suddenly pivot. In short, Embarcadero just felt wildly unfair and a little bit tedious to me despite the lovely action system. I will say this though, I loved the theme. I'm a SF Bay Area native, and the deep dive into this particular facet of local history was really cool to dig into. I even learned something new!
Carnage994
A unique theme, coupled with an interesting combination of mechanisms makes for a really enjoyable experience. It has a bit of area control, engine building and multi use cards and a very impressive table presence, in a game that is quite streamlined. I really enjoyed building the multilevel structures and the signature bonuses of some of the more valuable buildings. The first half of the game we were churning out a small amount of points, but by the end each new building had massive impacts. What I enjoyed the most was definitely the mechanism of building your hand for the next round while playing your current round. This allowed players to “build up” to their big combos while being able to mitigate the randomness of the card market. On the flip side, while we played this on tabletop simulator, I can only imagine how fragile the structures built up to level 4 would fare against a set of fat fingers. For those who plan to try it on TTS, I highly recommend removing the snap points and locking in structures once placed. My other gripe would be that the rulebook could have included a summary of the goal cards and other small items that led to house ruling and many BGG lookups.