Ceylon Review

Disaster has struck Ceylon. A disease has wiped out the coffee plantations leaving the local farming communities devastated. A new hero is needed. And that hero, is tea.

God, I do love tea.

Players: 2-4
Time: 60 min
Designer: Chris Zinsli, Suzanne Zinsli
Artist: Laura Bevon, David Prieto
Publisher: Ludonova

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It’s nice to have your wide open starting scenario for your Euro game be grounded in historical reality, rather than quietly ignoring the fact that people were probably already living here, or whatever. It gives a more positive grounding to your economic exploitation and gives the players something a little more real to latch on to. So they can focus on enjoying the game.

The game, in this case is all about your hand of cards. Each features two of the game’s 5 main actions. You’ll play one on your turn, performing one of the actions, and draw a new card. It makes things a little unpredictable, a little bit more about making the most of what you have rather than choosing your perfect sequence of moves. That would be boring. Far more challenging to ride the waves of fate, far more exciting when perfect opportunities arise and always you have time to set up what you do get into your hand.

But that’s far from the only thing you’ll be thinking about. See, the card you play also offers the second action to the other players around the table. And given the way scoring works, I do recommend multiple players. Every turn, everyone will get to do something. You might be desperate to harvest, but do you want to let everyone else move up the technology track? Urgh! This just got deliciously spicy.

Of course, you try to only offer up actions your opponents can’t benefit from. But on these off-turns players can always take a basic action, grabbing an extra couple of coins or moving their man around the board. And both of these are incredibly important. For one, everything important costs copious money so more than a couple of your turns will have to be spent grabbing cash, and for two you can’t stay still if you want to make the most of the main actions. The pressure to move is surprisingly high for a game about growing tea.

Planting requires being on an empty space and there are big points available for having the most plantations in a region and for having plantations in every region AND clearing the plantation markers off your player board is super helpful for completing contracts, as you’ll see later. Harvesting let’s you take a tea cube for each plantation within grabbing distance so being in the right place at the right time is paramount. A target complicated by the 3 flavours of tea, corresponding to the 3 physical levels of the board and that while you can absolutely harvest your opponents plantations, they get a point each time you do so. Adding yet more pressure to grab the best plantation spots at the start of the game.

Finally you have the dignitaries whose attention you’ll most certainly want to grab (with money). These fine people not only give you an ongoing bonus for the rest of the game, your plantations in their region won’t score anything if you haven’t visited them! But to curry their favour you need to be in their region when you take the corresponding action. Note, the names are the names of the regions not the people. Which is a shame, because I really wanted this guy to be called Kandy.

Oh, the Kandy man can!

In a wonderful twist there will be rounds where your opponents will offer you up perfect actions that you’ll greedily take only to realise you’ve failed to save enough cash or moved to where you need to be to make a good show of your own turn. It’s rather amusing and more importantly makes every turn, even your opponent’s, interesting.

The less positionally important actions involve fulfilling tea deliveries at the train and hopping a space up the technology track. Technology is the simplest to perform, but has some of the farthest reaching implications. Firstly, each tech tile you earn from this action can be spent on doing a second action from one of your cards, really letting you accelerate your game, the track itself is a region for area majority scoring and your relative position decides all other ties. A potentially game deciding factor. But it’s expensive and everyone else gets a rupee for each move on it you make. Something something trickle down economics.

Even an action as tediously unoriginal as trade in cubes for points is given a new lease of life here thanks to the train carriages. Each contract you fulfill needs to be placed on your player board, in spaces that are initially filled with your plantation markers. While contracts come numbered from 1 to 5 and can be stacked on matching numbers, you’ll want to have as many different types as possible and this requires you to build plantations.

Everything on Ceylon links together. You need to harvest to fulfil contracts which requires you to plant to create space which is needed to harvest. Planting makes you want to compete for the area majorities which requires appeasing the nobles which unlocks abilities to help your other actions. Meanwhile technology supports your ability to score those majorities and dramatically increases your flexibility.

Your ability to move through this maze is limited by your hand and the constant stream of opportunities gifted you by other players. It’s here that the game lies and in some way that limitation railroads you. It’s a much more tactical game than it is strategic and that feels right for a system that effectively demands you do a bit of everything. The one issue seems to come from noble and, to a lesser extent, technology actions that in my experience with the game tend to be played for a player’s own action, thereby cutting other players off from taking them if they don’t draw into those cards.

That is going to be frustrating for players who like to have control over what they are trying to do. As I said, this is a tactical game, and I believe the correct response to not getting the card you want is to lean harder into the cards you do have – plant faster, fulfil contracts and rush the end of the game before those noble-obsessed competitors have time to capitalise.

Does this mean the game plays you then? Not in the least. The need to optimise your money flow and your positioning on the board around both the action you know you intend to play, and the offers your opponents make is constantly interesting, and forces you to make adjustments on the fly. The difference between an opponent moving up the technology track or not can make the difference between you being able to afford your desired action or not. Such a system creates those moments where everything aligns just so and you feel great.

It also creates those frustrating moments where you have to make do with something less good and I love those too. But I can see how a player attempting to force the game to align to their preferred strategy is going to suffer. Such a player will likely bemoan their luck and dismiss the game. But I feel they would be as wrong to do that as they were wrong to attempt to define their play of the game. Ceylon is not about building a road to your destination, it’s riding a river.

Ceylon is a delightful little game. Simple but fascinating, and spectacularly quick. A Euro with player interaction at every turn. Whose replayability doesn’t come from trying a different strategy next time but in how you’ll deal with the hand you’re dealt, the behaviour of other players, and the nuances that come with that. I had hoped it would be good and it has more than lived up to expectations!

Rating: A BeauTea

Our copy of Ceylon was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can get a copy for £38.99 from your local hobby store.