Santa Maria Review
Santa Maria sweeps across the ocean to a land of opportunity! Virgin land fit to become a new home for the aspiring Spaniard. Look at these happy colonists. This smiling leader of men. Smiling, because he has the great fortune to be making a new home from the very materials at hand. Perhaps he’ll even find some gold.
It’s like a propaganda reel.
Players: 2-4
Time: 45-90 mins
Designer: Eilif Svensson, Kristian Amundsen Østby
Artist: Gjermund Bohne
Publisher: Aporta Games
Santa Maria may be emerging in consensus as the best Euro game from last year’s Essen. Which must be why the chap on the front of the box looks so damn cheery. In fact, everything looks happy, from the little colonists and monks to the pastel coloured artwork. Come to South America! It’s a happy place for happy people! Even the victory points are smiling.
It’s… immensely disturbing. Especially when you put this completely unthematic Euro game into the context of its setting. Armoured Santa on the front is, of course, a conquistador, and this happy colonisation effort was anything but happy for the civilisations decimated and exploited by the men like him. The conquistadors are casually incorporated as nothing more than a track that gets you gold and victory points, as though they are just picking it up off the ground. And not slaughtering their way through the local cities.
So many board games deal with these themes of colonisation and expansion without acknowledgement of the fact that these territories were never simply empty. Just empty of historians’ ancestors. But even those games try not to be so specific in setting as Santa Maria, nor as callous in their disregard for what was going on. I mean come on… smiling, pink, European faces for victory points!?
This insensitive theming is a tragedy. I should be espousing Santa Maria’s clever mechanics and engaging puzzle from the get go but instead I have to decide whether to even continue. Does enjoying this game on a purely mechanical level make us complicit? This is a game that is mechanics first, and had they chosen a more appropriate theme I would not hesitate to recommend it. And the theme does drop away entirely as you go through the motions of an actual game.
Ultimately I think that decision has to be up to you. I can, and have, pointed out its shortcomings. If they are red lines then don’t get this game. If they aren’t, then read on.
The core cleverness of Santa Maria is in its player boards. Here you will construct a colony, arranging tiles around the starting buildings in just the right way to earn points and set up a powerful resource generating engine. Each column and row of the board can be activated in a single action, if you take the right die from the shared pool. Building up your board in such a way as to make the most of the available dice, hopefully before your opponents take them, is the central challenge and a hugely satisfying puzzle.
Each building typically awards you one or two resources. Creating a column full of buildings might get you a mountain of rewards but is that necessarily the best plan? Three things pull you away from that. The first is the usual fresh dice rolls and dice drafting each round that might encourage a more flexible approach. The second is how spots on your board get blocked up by dice as they are used, encouraging some diversity and cunning when choosing the order in which you activate parts of your board. The final thing are the little colonists who appear on the otherwise useless road spaces of these tiles. They also want to be in filled rows and columns and will reward you end game points if you can manage it.
This will be the focus of your game and it’s a great, engaging focus. The other elements, the conquistadors, the boats, the monks, are all peripheral elements that feed off of this core. The conquistadors, as mentioned, are little more than a track moved along when you activate a conquistador building. The boats are where you’ll be ditching a significant amount of your resources, those you don’t sell for money or spend on building new tiles. It’s good points down at the docks, and there’s a nice end of round reward system based on what boats you’ve collected.
The monks, who are summoned by regular prayer and wheat donations, let you pursue extra end game scoring objectives, or unlock special powers. These end game objectives are generally pretty interesting, making you really think about how to construct your colony, often in ways that feel somewhat counter to the core resource loop and implausibly hard at first glance. Of course, they are anything but, if you keep them in mind from turn 1. The special powers, on the other hand, are much less interesting. They never feel particularly powerful and I wish they were.
Even setting aside the theme, I don’t feel like Santa Maria is perfect. Those special powers are disappointing and the sometimes overwhelming nature of your options can cause play to grind to a halt, especially as another player’s action – taking a particular die or tile say – can force you to completely re-evaluate your options. Interaction is, of course, a good thing though. And that wealth of options is what gives rise to the incredible satisfaction of constructing and running a powerful system.
Santa Maria is a game that continues to grow on me after each subsequent play. I find myself pulling off ever more impressive and interesting combinations. It was a little overwhelming on a first play, but oh boy do you feel like you learn to maximise this system. And say one thing for those terrifying victory point markers, at least they do a good job of hiding the scores so new players don’t feel completely crushed by veteran conquistadors.
As I said earlier on, if Santa Maria had a more tasteful theme then this would be an easy recommendation. As it is I remain conflicted. I just don’t feel sufficiently inspired by the mechanical puzzle to forgive it’s wilfully ignorant theme. Not now. Not in 2018.
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