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Ostia: The Harbor of Rome is a game of auctions and blind selection by Stefan Risthaus.
Players: 3-5
Time: 60-75 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)
The Components
Ostia contains:
- 5 player boards
- 72 cards
- paper money
- 60 victory point chips
- 1 starting player token
- 20 storehouses
- 1 rulebook
Player Boards: These very attractive player boards are printed on linen-textured cardboard. Each one shows a pictures of Ostia, with spaces for four warehouses. It also contains spaces for the three locations you can put cards: the forum, the senate, and storage. Finally, there's a very helpful summary of all the rules.
These player boards feature attractive and colorful art and are overall well done.
Cards: Ostia is essentially a card game, and so these are the heart of the gameplay. Included are: 51 resources cards, 10 bluff cards, 5 ship cards, and 6 senate cards.
Generally the cards feature attractive artwork and are easy to read. The resources are carefully color-coordinated, and those colors are also very clearly marked on the Senate cards, making them overall easy to use.
The ship cards, which are intended to separate cards meant for auction from those which aren't, really aren't necessary, and tend to confuse players. I suggest not using them, and instead placing cards not up for auction on the storage area of your player board.
The one deficiency in these cards is that they're printed on overly light cardstock. They're not terrible, but when you shuffle them you can feel how thin they are. I expect they won't stand up well to continued play.
Paper Money: Full-color, attractive paper money printed on very thin, glossy paper. Though it looks nice, the money is unfortunately pretty low quality--some of the worst I've seen in a game.
Wood Bits: There are 60 red tokens which mark victory chips, 1 large blue token which marks the start player, and a number of natural-colored houses, which are used for storehouses. These are easy to distinguish and nice.
Rulebook: An 8-page rulebook printed full paper on glossy stock. It's full of illustrations and examples and is easy to learn the game from.
I was a bit stuck on how to rate this game Stylistically. Overall it's got attractive artwork that's bright and colorful, and all the components are well-designed and easy to use. Unfortunately the component quality of both the cards and the paper money is notably subpar. Mainly on that basis I ended up giving Ostia a high "3" out of "5" for Style: slightly above average. It would have instead been a high 4 if the cardstock and moneystock had been more normative.
The Gameplay
The object of Ostia is to earn money and ultimately win favor in the senate.
Setup: Each player is given a player board and one storehouse, which he places on his Ostia. Each player also receives 1 resource card, 2 bluff cards, and 55 denarii.
The Senate cards are shuffled and two are flipped face-up. A victory point chip is placed on the first one, to note that it's the Senate card for round one. These cards each depict 5 of the 6 goods, and note how the Senate values those goods from "5" to "1"; players will consult these cards to determine how to win influence with the Senate for the current and the next round. (There will always be two Senate cards face-up.)
Order of Play: The players jointly engage in the following phases of play:
- Harbor
- Office
- Forum
- Senate
- Storehouses
Harbor: Each player draws 5 new resource cards. He stores one away, and sets the other 4 aside for auction.
Now each player will auctio his four cards, two at a time, in order around the table from the first player. Auctions are simple once-around affairs with one catch: players do not have to bid more than other players. However, if a player does bid, he must match the minimum for the two cards: each card has a minimum bid (which is inversely related to the number of that good type in the deck). For example wheat has a minimum bid of 4 and wine has a minimum bid of 7, so for that set a player will have to bid at least 11 or pass. After each person has placed a bid or passed, the auctioneer now chooses a bid or buys the cards himself.
If he takes a bid from another player, he hands that player the two cards, takes their money, and gives half of it it (rounding up) to the bank, to pay off his foreign shippers. Instead a player can buy the cards himself for 1 more than the highest bid, but in this case he must pay the entire amount to the bank.
 Office: Now each player must decide what to do with his cards by placing them face-down on the Forum, the Senate, or in Storage.
He may place cards in the forum to sell, but the more of a good type that are sold on a turn (by all players), the less each of that good is worth.
He may place cards in the Senate, hoping to gain recognition (and victory points) there, but this will be a direct head-to-head competition with other players.
(There's also another restriction here, which is that players may have no more than 3 good types, total, placed between the Forum and the Senate, so for example if a player had already put wheat, wine, and tusks on one or both of those locations, he couldn't also place pottery there.)
Finally, a player may choose put cards in storage. He may be able to keep these until the next round, depending on how many storehouses he has.
The two bluff cards may be used here too, to make it less obvious where you're placing your cards; a player can put them in whichever of the 3 areas he wants.
Afterward everyone is done, all players reveal what they placed in the Forum and the Senate, and everyone checks that they limited themselves to 3 card types.
Forum: Every good that was placed in the Forum is sold. The value of each good is based upon how many goods of that type are available in the Forum that turn (from all players). There's a simple chart for this that is printed on every player board.
For example, if there is only 1 of a good available it sells for 15 denarii. Conversely if there are 4 of a good, they sell for 8 each, meaning that 2 of a good in a more glutted marked are worth 16 denarii, just slightly more than 1 of a good in a starved market.
Senate: Now each player determines their influence in the Senate. Their cards placed here each have a value from 0-5, based on the current Senate card. Each player counts up their Senate value, and the top three players are given 3, 2, and 1 victory points, respectively.
Now, all Forum and Senate cards are discarded.
Storehouse: Each player now has the opportunity to buy storehouses for 10 denarii each, up to a maximum of four storehouses.
A player will be able to save a number of cards equal to his number of storehouses for the next round; everything else must be discarded.
Ending the Game: The game runs for 5 rounds of play. Afterward some final victory calculations are done.
First, players may immediately sell off any storehouses they didn't use on the last round for 7 denarii each.
Next, each player gets one victory point for each different type of good they stored on the last round (to that maximum of four goods in four storehouses).
Finally, the players compare their money and the leaders in this category get 3, 2, and 1 denarii.
The player with the most victory points wins.
Relationships to Other Games
I seem to be reviewing a lot of logistical games lately. They all tend to center on a core tradeoff between money and victory points and earning money to earn victory points. In some money and victory points are the same thing, and in others they're two elements that you must balance. Ostia is clearly the latter, much like recently reviewed Siena.
Like many logistical games, Ostia centers on auctions. The ones here are very simple, but they feature a distinct feature: the ability of the auctioneer to select which bid he wants to take, a feature seen in just a few other games, like Res Publica and Oasis (though each in a substially different form).
Ostia's other major element is simultaneous selection. Ostia again is pretty distinct here because you're putting multiple objects into a few different spaces. More commonly simultaneous selection includes simpler "blind bidding" or "simultaneous action". Nonetheless, a lot of the principles for the gameplay are the same, even if it's expressed differently.
The Game Design
The prime criticism I hear concerning Ostia is that it's a lot of auctions. And, it is. Over a game each player will conduct 10 different auctions, which means that you'll have 30-50 total, depending on the number of players. That's a fair amount, and it is a slight amount more than most similar auction games. In Ra you have perhaps 25-30 meaningful auctions (with 36 being an absolute max).In Amun-Re you have 24-36. Medici probably averages 20-40.
Fortunately every auction in Ostia is quick and meaningful. There's just a single round of bidding, and then the auctioneer has to choose who to sell to, based on both what was bid and who bid it.
Overall, Ostia feels like it has a lot of meaningful choices in the game. One of the most interesting choices is how to divide up your four cards between two auctions, since you have to figure out how to get your lots to sell (or not to). You also must decide (as mentioned) who to sell to, as well as what to do with your cards during the simultaneous selection.
The simultaneous selection is another interesting gameplay element. There's usually a few "best" choices for what to sell, what to give to the Senate, and what to keep, and that keeps the selection interesting, but the potential second-guessing has a factual basis in self-interest. Finally, seeing how other people spoiled your plans (or didn't) when cards are revealed can be quite exciting, as in the best simultaneous selection games.
Ostia is also somewhat notable because it's one of the few logistical games that I know of that's got relatively deep gameplay, but still plays in just over an hour. In both its mechanics and its components, Ostia is quite compact.
On the whole Ostia works particularly well as a social game. If you interspace your card auctioning with patter, explaining why people should buy your cards, and if you extend that socialization throughout the game, Ostia works quite well and can be very enjoyable.
If Ostia has anything going against it, it's that it's not particularly original. The game systems are all pretty standard systems, but they're put together here into a pleasing, coherent whole. I've played Ostia twice, and this is one of those games where my enjoyment went up from the first game to the second. As such I've given it a "4" out of "5" for Substance: above average!
Conclusion
Ostia is an interesting and well-designed game that combines auctions and simultaneous selection. It really shines as a social game, to be played by people who enjoy talking with each other and engaging in group gameplay, and for those players, it's well recommended.
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