Review of Santiago

Santiago is a game of irrigation and auctions, finally released into the United States by Z-Man Games.

Players: 3-5
Time: 1 hour
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)

The Components

Santiago comes with:

• 1 game board
• 45 plantations
• 3 palm trees
• 1 canal overseer
• Wood Bits:
  • 110 yield markers
  • 5 proposed canals
  • 15 blue canals
  • 1 spring
• 150 bank notes
• 1 rulebook

Game Board: A one-panel gameboard printed on sturdy, linen-textured cardboard. It's a fairly plain 6x8 grid, with bold separations showing where canals can go.

Plantations: 45 linen-textured cardboard squares. Each one shows a specific type of crop, by color and picture (yellow bananas, green sugar cane, brown potatoes, aqua beans, and red peppers) as well as one or two planters. They're colorful and easy to use.

Palm Trees: Three sculpted plastic trees, used for a game variant.

Canal Overseer: A stand-up figure which marks the first player, printed full-clor on linen-textured cardboard.

Wood Bits: A collection of wood bits, of good quality as is typical in German games. Each player gets 22 square yield markers and 1 canal in his color. The colors are a bit strange (white, beige, gray, black, purple), but presumably that was to differentiate them from the colors of the plantations. In blue there are 15 more canals as well as a cylindrical spring.

Bank Notes: Paper currency, with values of $1, $2, $5, $20, and $50. The numbers are large and each bill also has a different color and picture, so they're easy to tell apart. The distribution, however, is a little subpar. There's no $10 bill, which you're frequently wanting, while the huge stack of 50s is not really needed. (Scores typically run to between 100 and 150.)

The box is a shallow long box, about the right size for the components. The tray is very well designed, with spaces for each individual component. You can also use it as a "bank" during the game, because the different bills each have a slot, which is a nice touch.

Rules: An 8-page full-color rulebook with plenty of examples and a nice summary at the back. Easy to learn from.

Overall the components for Santiago are high-quality, colorful, and easy to use, but not particularly beautiful. I've thus given it a "4" out of "5" for Style: above average.

The Gameplay

The object of Santiago is to earn the most money, primarily through the irrigation of large connected plantations.

Setup: The spring is located somewhere on the board, at a juncture of canal lines. An initial canal overseer is determined.

Each player gets a set of 22 yield markers, 1 proposed canal, 1 personal canal, and $10.

The plantations are stacked in either 4 piles of 11 or 5 piles of 9, depending on the number of players.

Order of Play: The players together participate in the following seven phases:

1. Bid on Plantations
2. Change Canal Overseer
3. Place Plantations
4. Bribe Canal Overseer
5. Conduct Extra Irrigation
6. Dry Plantations
7. Collect Income

Bid on Plantations: The top plantation tile is flipped face-up in each of the 4 or 5 piles. Each of these tiles shows 1 of 5 types of crops (bananas, sugar cane, potatoes, beans, or red peppers) and either 1 or 2 planters.

Starting to the left of the canal overseer, each player now bids in a once-around auction. However, there is no requirement to bid up previous players, you must simply bid different amounts. If you don't want to bid any money, you can instead pass (and multiple people are allowed to pass).

Change Canal Overseer: Whomever bid the least now becomes the new canal overseer. If multiple people passed, the person who passed first is considered to have bid the least.

Place Plantations: In descending order of bids, each player now takes one plantation and places it on the board. He then places a number of yield markers on the tile equal to the number of planters.

If a player passed, he still gets to place, but he puts one less yield marker on the tile (which often means zero).

(In a 3-player variant the player who won then gets to place the fourth tile, but with no yield marker; it still can increase the value of connected plantations, as discussed below).

Afterward all players put their full bids into the bank.

Bribe Canal Overseer: Next the players bid for where the next canal will be placed in another once-around auction. It must be placed on the bold canal lines (which each run in between 2 plantations on each side) and it must be connected to the network of canals that originate in the spring.

A player may bid for placement by: putting down his proposed canal where he wants the water to go, and backing it up with some amount of money; putting down money to back up someone else's suggested placement; or passing.

The canal overseer then either takes one of the proposals (and the associated money), or else places the canal where he wants, but pays the bank 1 more than the highest bid. Anyone whose proposal wasn't accepted gets their money back.

Conduct Extra Irrigation: Starting with the player to the left of the canal overseer, each player now has one chance to put down their personal canal; if one player chooses to, no else can that turn.

Dry Plantations: Each plantation without an adjacent canal now loses one yield marker. If the plantation already had no yield markers, its instead flipped over to its "desert" side.

Collect Income: Finally each player gets $3 to prepare for the next round.

Ending the Game: The game ends after 9 or 11 rounds of play, depending on the number of player. At this point all plantations without irrigation immediately lose all their yield markers and become desert.

Each player now earns money equal to the number of yield markers he has in each set of connected plantations of the same type, times the number of plantation tiles in that set. Note that this includes all of the appropriate type of tiles, no matter whose yield markers are on each.

So, in a small set of connected bananas where beige has 5 yield markers, black has 2, and there are 4 tiles total, beige earns 5x4=$20 and black earns 2x4=$8. Clearly there are times when you want to team up with other players to make great connected plantations, and times that you don't, and that's ultimately where much of the game lies.

See the above picture for other examples.

Relationships to Other Games

Santiago is ultimately a logistical auction game.

In many ways it reminds me of a Moon + Weissblum design. Like New England there's an auction for turn order that's ultimately paid for in cash, and it's necessarily a unique auction where each player bids a different value. Like Oasis (and to a lesser extent, New England too) you're increasing the valuation of specific types of crops by putting them together on a constrained board.

However, Santiago is ultimately a lot more logistical than most Moon & Weissblum games. There's a lot more careful counting, and trying to figure out the valuations of items before you purchase them. Here it reminds me the most of Modern Art, another logistics heavy auction game. You could probably insert your own favorite heavy counting logistics game as another example (St. Petersburg, Power Grid, etc.).

Finally, it's worth mentioning another unique game where you control the flow of water in order to cultivate crops: Dos Rios. There you get to move a river around with dams.

Oh, and it's worth noting that this is one of three German games that Z-Man Games has republished in the U.S., with the others being Primordial Soup and Saboteur. Thus far, Z-Man Games has shown very good taste in their German imports, and Santiago, like Primal Soup, is another one that deserved to be translated into English long ago. (It was originally a 2003 release.)

The Game Design

Santiago is a well-designed logistical game, and to a certain extent that says everything about the game design.

I sometimes find logistical games a little hard to rate because they can be so unforgivingly mathematical. Santiago isn't an exception. If you want to play the game well, when you look at an item you could buy in auction you have to look at the valuation of your plantations before you buy the item, look at the valuation afterward, then see how that difference measures up against your potential price. Since other people could bid higher or lower there's a bit of chaos introduced into the calculation, and that's probably a good thing because it reduces the paralysis because all you can ever do is make a "good enough" estimate.

Beyond that, Santiago has a couple of fairly unique (and different) auctions, and they introduce some originality and variability into the game.

There's some fairly hard decisions, particularly when to pass to grab the canal overseership at the cost of a yield token, and that comes out in both interesting tactics and strategy.

Finally, the game has some really nice mechanisms, including the canal placement and the idea that the lowest bidder in an auction gets a reward too.

It's worth noting that the 3-player game does work, which isn't always the case in auction games, and the fact that the extra tile often dries out helps keep the board nicely constrained.

My only real complaints with Santiago are that it's somewhat dry and there isn't a whole bunch of variability. Neither of these should be a big surprise for a logistical game of this length.

Overall I think it's a solid design and I've thus given it an above average "4" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Santiago is a fairly pure logistical game, and has the dryness and analysis that you'd expect from that genre of gaming. Beyond that it's got some original auction types, includes a number of other clever mechanics, plays quickly, and is overall interesting for its length. If you're fond of St. Petersburg, Power Grid and other logistics heavy games, this one should go on your shelf too. It's another feather in Z-Man Games' hats, as they've been thus far bringing over German games that have been unfairly neglected in the American market.