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The Nacho Incident is a new game by Jim Doherty, published by his Eight Foot Llama press.
Players: 2-4
Time: 1 hour
Difficulty: 4 (of 10)
The Components
The Nacho Incident comes with:
- 110 cards
- 1 bag
- 40 colored cubes
- 1 gemstone
- 1 rulebook
Cards: The cards are all medium-light, glossy and printed full color. They feature cartoony art by Scott Starkey which is largely fair to good, but some of it (particularly the flags for the provinces) looks over computerized. The cards are organized into a slightly bewildering set of types and figuring them out is much of the challenge of learning the game. They include: 56 smugglers, 12 mounties, 12 provinces, 16 cantinas, 2 rules reminders, and 8 score cards. (The rules also indicate that there are 4 warehouse cards, but if such exist they didn't make it into my game, not that they'd be that necessary in any case.)
The 56 Smuggler cards each depict a smuggler valued 1-9, a cost from 1-4, and a province. The provinces are all color-coded (white Quebec, red Ontario, green Saskatchewan, and blue Alberta), a method helpfully used throughout the cards. The best comedic art in the game is on these cards, which show the smugglers using increasingly ludicrous methods of travel the higher their number. #3 just canoes into Canada while #9 has a wacky UFO.
The Mountie cards show a province and a value (-3 or -4).
The Province cards are again color-coded, and each of these show what Mexican foods a province wants, with values. The food is color-coded too, to match the food cubes, and it was mostly easy to distinguish what was what.
Each player gets a set of Cantina cards, one per province (yep, color-coded again), which just shows you where you have smugglers setting up house.
Each player also gets a set of two Score cards, one showing tens digits and one showing ones digits. (You use extra cubes to mark these.) It's very nice that you don't have to mark this with a pencil and paper as might have otherwise been required, but in the few games I've seen that use this ten digit/one digit score keeping, it's confusing; it was here.
Finally there are two helpful reference cards, one of which reminds you what happens during the turn and one of which reminds you of the end of a round (and what happens then).
As already mentioned there's some nice consistency among the cards with province colors. Likewise some good effort has been made to make sure all the relevant info is prominently displayed on each card. However, some of our players did have problems with the fact that there are tons of different numbers among the cards, and they don't all mean the same thing. Just when you're scoring up Cantinas at the end of a round, for example, you have three numbers in front of you: a province value (which is the number you score if you win majority in that province), smuggler values (their value toward majority), and mountie value (the negative number they always force you to score). The game would have been a little cleaner if there'd been some way to differentiate these different values.
Bag: A nice drawstring felt bag which you keep the food cubes in; it's generally higher quality than the flimsy draw bags you sometimes find in games.
Cubes: 4 cubes each in the food colors, plus 8 cubes used for scoring. These are actually plastic cubes, not wooden, but are a good size and seem just as good as wooden bits to me.
Gemstone: A glass stone used to mark first player.
Rulebook: A four-page glossy rulebook. It has some illos and some examples though I still found it a little puzzling to read the first time.
It's worth also describing the theme of the game. Canada, apparently, has bad Mexican food. Very bad. And so smugglers have to steal into Canada carrying forbidden food. And when they get there they decide to stay and set up cantinas. But the mounties are ever vigilant! Honestly, I thought the premise was a bit dumb when I heard it, but it grew on me as I read the rules and then played the game. The cards are a nice and comical addition to the theme, and if anything, when I was done playing I wished I'd seen the theme more in the game, not less.
Beyond that Eight Foot Llama looks like it's a small publisher, and I'd guess these games were hand assembled. Nonetheless the quality of the components of this game are professional. On the whole I give The Nacho Incident a high "3" out of "5" for Style: average components boosted by a humorous and engaging theme.
The Game Design
The object of The Nacho Incident is to make the most money by smuggling forbidden Mexican food into Canada and supporting the best illegal cantinas in the country.
(Although Nachos were apparently actually invented in Mexico, they're not traditional Mexican cuisine. Most would consider them Tex-Mex food or possibly Baseball Stadium food ... but don't tell that to the Canadians.)
Setup: If you've ever played one of Adlung Spiele's card-games-that-play-like-board-games, this sightly complex setup will have resonance with you, because cards are used for lots of different things in this game.
The four Province decks are shuffled, and the top card of each is flipped up. Each of these cards show the four ingredients (corns, beans, tortillas, sour cream, pepper, olives, onions, or salsa) that the peoples of that province are craving.
The 12 Mountie cards are shuffled and dealt into three piles of four; the reference card which explains the end of the round is placed under the first pile, and the top mountie of that deck is flipped face up. (It'll show which province the mounties are stalking this turn.)
Each player is given a pair of score cards which they mark "10" to start.
Each player also lays out their four province Cantina cards, which will later be filled with Smugglers (and also help remind the players of the geographical order of the provinces, which is important).
Finally each players draws eight Smuggler cards and two food cubes (which are put in his "warehouse").
One player is given the gemstone, which is primarily used to break ties.
Let the smuggling begin!
Order of Play: On a turn, players take two major actions:
- Choose Smugglers
- Smuggle Foods
Choosing Smugglers: Each player selects one of their smugglers and places it face-down in front of him. All smugglers are then revealed simultaneously.
Whoever had the highest numbered smuggler attracts the attention of the mounties and is given the current Mountie card, which he places on his Cantina card for the appropriate province.
Each player will now take his turn in descending order of smuggler value, with ties broken clockwise from the gemstone.
Smuggle Foods: When smuggling a player may take his smuggler to either the province depicted on the smuggler or else the 1 or 2 provinces adjacent to the smuggler's province. Upon arriving the player may then deliver one food that the province desires. However, each food may only be delivered once! When it's delivered the food is placed on the province card; that delivery is now complete and no one else may deliver that food to the province (until a new province card is revealed).
A player is paid a value between 3 and 9 coins (points) for his delivery, as shown on the province card, however he must also pay the smuggler between 1 and 4 coins as shown on the Smuggler card. (Better smugglers are more expensive.) A player marks his profit, if any, on his Score card.
The First Player Exception. The first player (being the player with the best smuggler that turn) may do something else: he may steal from the other players! He may choose to deliver a food from another player, but in turn has to give that player all of his food.
 Setting Up Cantinas. After a smugglers drops his food off in Canada, he decides that he likes the socialized medicine system so much that he doesn't want to leave. He thus sets up a cantina and is placed on the appropraite Cantina card in front of the player.
However, mounties hang out at cantinas! The player now sees if he has any mounties and smugglers on the same province; if so the mountie arrests the best smuggler in that province. Both cards are discarded.
Ending a Turn: At the end of a turn: any Province cards that have had all 4 of their demands satisfied are discarded and replaced with a new one; each player gets the option to sell any remaining food for 1 coin each, then replenishes to two food cubes; and a new Mountie card is flipped face up.
Ending a Round: A round ends after four turns. At this point the cantinas are scored. The players all add up the value of their smugglers in each province. Whichever player has the highest smuggler total in a province discards all of his smugglers in that province (because they retire on their untold riches), but gets 4 or 5 points (depending on the province) reward.
However, mounties which are still hanging around decrease cantina business. Each mountie results in a 3 or 4 point penalty for that player!
Whoever has the lowest score is now given the gemstone for the next round.
Relationships to Other Games
The designer described his games as light, well-themed American games that nonetheless are built on strong Euro-game mechanics. I have only one disagreement with that assessment, which is I didn't find this game particularly light, as I discuss more in The Game Design, below. However, I can see the melding of American thematic sensibilities with good mechanics.
As I already mentioned, The Nacho Incident played like a card-game-that-plays-like-a-board-game, a category for which Adlung Spiele is quite famous. Verrater, Die Fugger, and Im Auftrag des Konigs are the games in that series which I've reviewed. I could easily see The Nacho Incident fitting into that series if he had a less comical theme and if it used less cards (since the Adlung games all seem to run about 60-70 cards).
Mechanically, The Nacho Incident is a blind-bidding game with an adjunct majority-control system. The blind-bidding centers around which smuggler to choose with the hope of delivering which food to which province. I actually think it's a pretty complex calculation. The majority-control centers around the cantina scoring. It's a definite secondary system in the game, but it allows for some interesting extra choices when you're figuring out what to do. However, blind bidding is really the heart of the game, and thus The Nacho Incident shares the most in common with other resource-allocation blind-bidding games, such as Caribbean.
The Game Design
The Nacho Incident is overall a fair game with strong Euro-style mechanics. The blind-bidding is interesting and requires multiple decisions: do you want to go first or not; are you worried about attracting the current mountie's attention; and are other players likely to either take your food or else sell the same food that you plan to? This goes straight into the resource management aspect of the game where you're also trying to balance the majorities that you control in various provinces via the cantinas your smugglers have set up there.
(The majority control system is particularly interesting because of the fact that you gain value in the various regions as a side-effect of the main gameplay, which isn't an element I've seen in many other games.)
Overall I can say that this game design has: interesting blind-bidding, very good tactics, and fair strategy.
However, I actually think that the blind bidding element goes too far and may ultimately be a deficit to the game. If you play casually, it's probably fine. However if you want to analyze the problem of an individual turn more thoroughly, it can take a quite a bit of time and attention, and there's sometimes an absolute best choice, which I don't think is a good element in a blind bidding game. If you can manage to lay out a scenario where, if you make a delivery, you'll get a good price and put a smuggler in a province that you like, but where if any other player exchanges food cubes with you, you can still make some delivery, then that's usually a pretty clear win, allowing you to play a low-value smuggler with no danger, and it'll often be an optimal choice because the low-value smugglers cost so much less to play than the high-value ones that other players might flirt with (though they're worth less in the cantina scoring at the end too).
One of the reasons that this high-calculation requirement to make a really good blind bid sits poorly with me is that there's also a high degree of randomness in the game. Which food cubes you happen to draw can make a huge difference, and likewise you can get stuck with either a handful of low-value or high-value Smuggler cards, which will notably impact your gameplay. Which is fine and what I'd expect of the sort of game that the publisher said he was developing, but nonetheless a bad combination with the heavier analysis.
The one other complaint that I have about the game is that it's a little "fiddly". It seems like you're constantly passing around cards and cubes and I find that this sort of thing often detracts from gameplay for me, because it feels like you're bookkeeping rather than playing.
On the whole I give The Nacho Incident an average Substance rating of "3" out of "5". It's got some interesting gameplay but also some weight issues and a lot of passing of pieces. Players who are able to play a game that supports a high amount of analysis without feeling the need to do that analysis will enjoy it more.
Conclusion
Eight Llama Games' credo seems to be creating light, family games with strong Euro mechanics. The Nacho Incident has a light, funny theme and an amount of randomness that I'd expect in this genre, but if anything the mechanics were too serious, and I found myself doing a lot more calculation and analysis than I want to in a game of this weight. If you can tune out that sort of analysis, the game is worth looking at, as it's a good combination of Euro mechanics (specifically, blind bidding, resource management, and majority control) with American aesthetics.
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