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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
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Kickstarter – Gamefound
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jgoyes
2022-09-18 Initial Rating: 7.0 (September 2022) My desire to play Embarcadero was high as some friends love it and recommended it to me (I even backed it on KS). After I played it, I can say there is a lot to like here, but I also dislike some parts of the game, so it is not a game for me. Embarcadero´s rules aren’t very complex to teach. You can do it under 6 minutes. Playtime is around 150 minutes. The game´s components are ok, but they look great on the table. The art is good. The theme is novel and fun , but you don´t really feel it through the game. Gameplay seemed very interesting at first. Players are trying to build ships and buildings to get resources and VPs. Each round you must use a card, either to build it or to discard it for some 1-time reward, after you do this, you must get a new card from the market and then you must discard a card from your hand to your player board, these cards will be picked up in the next round. So, knowing which cards to build and which to discard is a fun and interesting decision and the best the game has to offer IMO. There is an area majority scoring in with the docked ships and there is an influence track that gives you rewards for reaching certain steps. Knowing where and what to build is a fun decision as well. If you dock a ship, you can increase your presence in said dock, but it is expensive, if you build adjacent to an opponent you can gain influence. Besides this, knowing where to build is also important because you can build up to 4 floors with different sized foundations. This puzzle is fun and interesting. Money is always tight, and I enjoy this. To summarize, Embarcadero offers interesting decisions as you juggle what to build and where to build it (it has big spatial considerations). The luck factor is high and there is a mediocre mitigation element (you can reset the market by doing a scrap action, but even then, nothing is guaranteed). The market deck always offers 4 ships and 4 buildings, and each card has a different icons, it has a type and it has a different size. This means you cannot really plan to get a card of a particular kind/size or a card that gives the resource you need. If it appears you can take it, if not bad luck. This situation, for sure, will benefit some players more than others and it hinders our planning ability. In the same vein, there are some scoring cards that have to do with the kind of card and if this kind of card appears in very few quantities, some players won’t have the means to compete in this scoring facet just by luck (player order) and I hate this. There is no way to see more cards, you use one per turn and draw one per turn from the market, if these cards don’t have a good synergy bad luck. This makes the game very tactical which is ok, but it bothers me a lot as this situation will, unfairly, benefit some players and hinder some players just by luck, not skill. There is also another source of luck which I DESPISE, and this kills the game for me. When you gain enough influence, you can draw a landmark card. These landmark cards are very powerful but as you only draw one, it just luck if you draw one that you can build right away or not. You cannot plan to have the right resources and sizes in your board. If the player who draw it cannot build it, any other player can in his turn and these cards can be game changing, so I hate how they work, it is PURE luck if you get a good one or not and worse, you can even help an opponent by revealing these cards, but you never know beforehand. I hate this and I cannot stand it. If you could see them before drawing them, you could plan to get them at the correct moment, but as they work now, it is pure luck if they benefit you or not. To summarize, I feel the game has an unacceptable luck level with the cards, especially the landmark cards and this alone kills the game for me. Each player has a different power but we didn’t play it this way so I cannot comment on this. At this point I hope the powers are balanced. Best with 3 players. Bottom line, I was expecting more from Embarcadero, but I concede it is a good game. It offers interesting decisions combined with a mix of strategy and tactics. The luck factor is much higher than I can accept so I will be selling the game ASAP. I know the luck factor doesn´t bother most gamers the way it bothers me but I hate it here. I could play it again if requested as there is a lot to like here, but my desire to play I again is low. Current Rating: 5.0
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.
sgclouthier
Pretty impressed with the new to us, but not particularly new tile laying, hand management, area control game Embarcadero. Themed on building of the bay area waterfront in gold rush era 1850's San Francisco, you'll reclaim abandoned ships to garner reusable resources to repurpose as shops to control the expanding docks and earn influence on the city council track as you vie for bonuses and intermediate scoring across three rounds. A bit AP inducing, but love the decision space even at 2P, thought-provoking card play, components and 3D building aspect as the gameboard evolves. After 90 minutes matching wits and 281 VPs earned just one point determined the winner, you can't ask for a better time!