Lisboa

[IMG]https://cf.geekdo-static.com/mbs/mb_2905_0.gif[/IMG] Lisboa: Deluxe Edition PROMO: Lisboa: Heavy Cardboard Promo Lisboa: Queen Variant (2020)

I'm rating this a 10 to objectively reflect the quality of the game: the rich and well integrated theme, the top notch components, the beautiful artwork, the comprehensive player aids, the simplicity of the just-play-one-card on your turn game play and the very clever interaction between all the game mechanisms. It's a fantastic creation.

Subjectively, from the point of view of my experience playing a friend's copy with 4 players, it'd have to be a 6. There is so much to get your head round it's initially very difficult to know what you should do. We've played around 300 board games in the last 5 years and this was the first for which my wife said she would have quit the game if the surviving three could have continued without her.

Another player became hugely frustrated at his inability to Visit a Noble in order to access the main three game actions because he had insufficient "influence". It went like this:

How do you get more influence? By building a ship. How do you build a ship? By giving up some goods to perform a trade. How do you get some goods? By producing from your stores. How do I build a store? By visiting a Noble for which you'll need influence. How do you get more influence? Etc

There are cards to help break the cycle, but if you don't have them it can feel tiresome being stuck in a rut.

The two hour estimate for 4 players was optimistic. We were 90 mins setting up and going through the rules. The game lasted about 3.5 hours and involved a lot of rule checking in response to "How do I...?" and "What does this icon mean?".

Is it worth more than £100? Maybe, for the right group. Not for us though.

Beautiful game. Like in every Vital's game, theme and mechanics are very intricately intertwined. Only one thing on the negative side, again, like in most Vital's games - fluidity. Downtime can be heavy, AP moments are not uncommon. All in all, time flies when you play Lisboa and when you are finished, you want to play one more game. But it's midnight already.

Own the [boardgame=232915]Heavy Cardboard[/boardgame] and the [boardgame=301771]Queen Variant[/boardgame] promos.

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Really like The Gallerist but this one is just a step ahead. Perhaps it's because I own this and not the Gallerist OR maybe it just the wigs!?