Players: 3-5
Playing Time: 30-45 minutes

The Components

Key Largo comes in a medium-sized box with a variety of attractive components:

The Board: A four-panel board that displays the island of Key Largo and the various places that you might visit there. The board generally shows off the high points of Key Largo's components. It's got bright and beautiful artwork, and it also features all the information that you'll need when you're at the various locales (namely charts of prices for items available there).

Cards: There are 130 cards total in the game, all of relatively heavy weight, with some gloss. These include 80 wreck cards, 25 action cards, and 25 encounter cards. Again there's good art on all of them: in particular the wrecks' treasure cards are easy to distinguish thanks to distinctive colors and the encounter cards feature lots of different pieces of arts. Also of note, the action cards feature terrific utility, telling you pretty much everything you need to know about using each type of card.

Cardboard Bits: Among the cardboard bits are 15 divers plus 40 pieces of equiment, which includes 20 hoses, 10 tridents, and 10 weights. They're all printed on thick cardboard with attractive illustrations. The divers are notable because they feature 15 different pieces of artwork. As with the extra effort spent on all the different encounters, this amount of unique art is rare in a board game.

Boats: There are five huge wooden boats in the five player colors.

Money: Paper money, but it's printed on better paper stock than most. Care has also been taken to print the different denominations in very distinct colors, to make it easy to see what's what.

Overall, the components of Key Largo are very attractive, well-produced, and generally make the game easier to play. As such, they earn a full "5" out of "5" for Style.

The Gameplay

The object of Key Largo is to earn the most money from searching wrecks and ferrying tourists.

Setup: Each player gets $100 and 1 diver. They're also given a deck of 5 action cards, which they'll use to choose their actions each turn.

Finally, a set of 11-16 wrecks is set up around the board. Wrecks come in three depths--shallow, medium, or deep--and each one consists of 5 cards which contain treasures or monsters.

Order of Play: On a turn each player secretly selects two action cards from his set of five, one for morning and one for afternoon. These will define his two actions for the day. Morning is resolved with each player placing his boat at the appropriate location for the action, then taking the action.

Go Dolphin Watching. This gives you a set amount of money, $30-$60, depending on the day of the week. Using optional rules, it also gives you an "encounter" card, which you can later use to gain an advantage in a future turn.

Go to the Tavern. Here you can hire an additional diver, buy a round of drinks (to look at the cards in a wreck), and (optionally) hire a thief. The costs of these actions vary based on the number of players who selected the action. So, for example, if only one player went to the tavern, a diver costs $80, but if three or more did, it costs $120. Punishing players for all doing the same thing is a major aspect of the game's simultaneous action component.

Shop for Equipment. Here a player can buy hoses, tridents, and weights for his divers, but no more than two total items per visit. As usual, the costs go up when there are more players here.

Search a Wreck. This is the core action from the game, as it's the main way to make money. A player chooses a wreck in one of the three depths. He then gets to explore it with his divers. However, a diver must have sufficient hoses to get to the depth: none for shallow, one for medium, and two for deep. For every diver who can reach the wreck, the player gets to draw a card from the the wreck's cards.

Most cards are treasures in one of four type: goods, artifacts, gold, or jewels. Some, however, are monsters which scare a diver away unless he expends a trident to kill it.

Finally, divers can get a second pull from a wreck deck if he drops a weight.

Sell at Market. Goods, artifacts, and gold all have a value of $20 per crate at endgame, but can be sold previous to that for more. Goods increase in money if few people are selling, artifacts increase in money if lots of people are selling, and gold sells at a constant value of $30 per crate. A player visiting the market can sell all his goods of one type, and thus squirrel away more money (or possibly stockpile it to buy more divers or equipment).

Ending the Game: The game ends after ten days of diving. The player with the most money, plus value of unsold treasures, wins.

Relations to Other Games

This was one of two games designed by Paul Randles prior to his death. The other was Pirate's Cove. In many ways, Key Largo is a sequel to Pirate's Cove, and not just because it's theoretically set on the same island hundreds of years later. Both games feature simultaneous selection of actions and resource management. Key Largo is a faster, simpler game than Pirate's Cove, and overall feels like a better game as a result. It's a pity that Randles' second game was his last, as his design surely would have only improved with additional releases.

The Game Design

Key Largo is touted as a "family board game", and as I already note, it's simple and plays fast. That makes it a pretty good choice for family play. However, it's also got more depth to it. This really comes about through the simultaneous action system, which works quite well. There's risk and reward, as you try and balance what you could get versus the chances of other people raising your prices. It's overall quite elegant, with meaningful choices every turn. Beyond that, the resource management is pretty light, but fun nonetheless. Cash is important early in the game, then later on you have to decide which supplies to purchase, and thus which depths you'll be salvaging from.

Generally, I think that Key Largo is a very good family game that should allow for play by a variety of ages. As a more serious gamer, I enjoyed it as well and think that it works great as a light filler. I'm not entirely sure that it'll stand up to numerous replays by more serious players, but since that's not the prime demographic for the game, I don't have any concerns there.

I've given Key Largo a "4" out of "5" for Substance: it's a good game.

Conclusion

Key Largo is a fun game of simultaneous action and chance-taking. It's primarily a light game, which will work well for family play or as a light filler before more serious fare.

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