Caribbean is a game of blind-bidding, bluffing and piracy by Michail Antonow and Jens-Peter Schliemann, published in the U.S. by Rio Grande Games.
Players: 2-4
Time: 30 minutes
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)
The Components
Caribbean comes with a set of very nice components:
- 1 game board
- 6 pirate ships
- 4 card holders
- 35 doubloons
- 28 bribe cards
- 16 treasure chests
Game Board: small A six panel linen-textured cardboard game map which shows the 18th century Caribbeam with lots of harbors and safe havens scattered around the board. It's attractive and the different elements are easy to make out (though you'll often have to search to find a specific harbor when you're placing treasures).
The very irregular spaces on the board caused confusion for some of our players who would have prefered it to be more obvious what the exact distances were between two locations.
Pirate Ships: The pirate ships are the first of a number of components all made from high-quality linen-textured cardboard.
The boats are each made from three pieces of cardboard which together form a three-dimensional ship which looks very evocative. Each ship is clearly marked with a letter between "A" and "F", so it's simple to make out the various ships in the game. Overall, quite cool.
There were two slight problems with these ships. First, out of the 6 ships, 2 of them didn't fit together very tightly, and so could fall apart if you weren't careful when you moved them. Second, the die-cutting on the boats was poor, and thus you had to be really careful when you punched them out so that you wouldn't tear them (a problem shared with the card holders).
Card Holders: Another three-dimensional item. There are four of these, in the four player colors (red, blue, green, yellow). Each one is composed from four bits of cardboard . They're intended to hold your bribe cards, which you slide into the holders. I wasn't entirely impressed by these, as they seemed a bit clunky, and I would have much preferred a scrabble-like holder, but they still did the job OK.
Other Cardboard Bits: The game also includes a few other bits all on linen-textured cardboard. First are 16 treasure chests, each with a harbor name and a value. Second, each player gets a set of 7 bribe cards in their player color, marked with a barrel and a number from -1 to 5. They're all obvious and easy to use.
Doubloons: The doubloons are plastic coins in copper, silver, or gold, with slight size differentials so that you can tell them apart. I never find these too evocative, but they're nice and do the job (which is really to count victory points).
Rulebook: A 3-page full-color rulebook that's easy to use and reference.
Box & Tray: A small square box that will be pretty much filled by the time you've punched and assembled all the bits. There's a pretty worthless cardboard tray that you'll probably remove.
Overall, Caribbean is quite pretty, largely because of its colorful board and its neat three-dimensional ships. The components are all pretty high quality, except for a few points mentioned above, and overall everything is beautiful. Thus the game ekes in a full "5" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Caribbean is to loot and deliver the most valuable treasure chests.
Setup: The 6 pirate ships are arbitrarily placed on the 6 starting spaces on the board. The treasure chests are shuffled and 6 are put face-up on the board, each at their appropriate harbor. The remaining 10 are placed face-down in 5 piles of two each.
Each player chooses a color and gets the card holders and bribe cards for that color.
As a point of important reference: the pirate ships don't belong to players. Instead the players will be bribing them with barrels of rum!
Order of Play: Each round the following actions occur:
- Choose Bribes
- Bribe & Move Each Ship
Choose Bribes: Each player has a set of 7 bribe cards which are numbered -1 to 5. The -1 is special, but otherwise each bribe's value is all that's important.
In addition there are six ships scattered across the board.
The first thing a player must do in a round is secretly assign 6 of his 7 bribes to the 6 ships. He does this by placing the six bribes in the cardholder (which is helpfully labeled with each of the six ship names).The leftover 7th bribe is used as a tiebreaker.
Bribe & Move Each Ship: Now the bribes are revealed one at a time, starting with ship "A" (the Arriba) and finishing with ship "F" (the Fuego). All players simultaneously reveal their bribe for that ship, and whoever bribed the most gets to move the ship.
If there is a tie then each player takes his tiebreaker piece (if he still has one this round) and secretly places it face-up or face-down. Highest face-up tie breaker gets to move the ship.
If there's a tie again, the ship doesn't move.
Moving the Ship. Once a player has won control of a ship for a round he immediately gets to move it a total number of spaces equal to his bribe value (0 to 5), minus one space for each -1 that was played.
Each space moved costs one point. In addition a player can take the following free actions: capture a treasure from a harbor where it starts off (giving the player an immediate $2,000, and putting the treasure on the ship); steal a treasure chest from an adjacent ship; exchange treasure chests with an adjacent ship (because each ship can only carry one); or pass on a treasure chest to an adjacent ship.
Each player has three safe havens. When a player drops off a treasure chest in one of his own safe havens (either by moving into it, or by passing off a treasure to another ship already there) he immediately gets its value in doubloons (typically $4,000 to $8,000).
After a ship is moved, bribes are then revealed for the next one.
Ending a Round: A round ends when all 6 ships have been bribed, and either moved or not. Two additional treasure chests are revealed and placed and the next round begins.
Ending the Game: The game ends when one player has gathered between $31,000 (for 4 players) and $62,000 (for 2 players). The current round is finished out and whoever has the most money wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Caribbean is a blind-bidding auction game. Blind-bidding (or closed) auctions involve all the players simultaneously making a bid, then revealing them. Some gamers dislike closed auctions because they introduce an element of randomness, where you have to guess and double-guess your opponents, while others enjoy them because they're very different from your standard auction model. Fist of Dragonstones is another blind-bidding game; this auction type also appears as one of the sales methods in Modern Art.
Fairly uniquely among auction games, in Caribbean you're not bidding for some resource that you then get to keep; instead you're voting for the right to (very) temporarily move a token on the board. It's that inventiveness that really makes the game.
The Game Design
Overall, Caribbean is a light filler, but it's also a lot of fun.
As already noted the blind bidding in this game does introduce a lot of randomness to the game. But there's also enough room to try and second-guess your opponents with very clever moves. The blind-bidding was more enjoyable here than in most other games I've played because the results were often funny. There was one round in our review game where absolutely nothing happened because every player was foiled by someone else's moves. That was very amusing and interesting.
If I had one word for Caribbean, it'd be clever. The idea of moving communal ships around to get treasures for yourself really works and makes the game unique and exciting.
i won't pretend the game is deep; it's not. It also gets a little slow at the end when the treasure chests are just about gone and no one has quite won. (Through really degenerate play you can actually stall the game out at the end becaue the total value of chests is so close to the victory conditions, but there's really no point in doing so.)
Overall, I give Caribbean a solid "4" out of "5" for Substance. It's a fun filler.
Conclusion
Caribbean is an original blind-bidding game where you bid not for resources, but instead to move communal pirate ships around the board in the hope of collecting treasure chests for yourself rather than the other players. As with most blind-bidding games it's a bit random and a bit chaotic. However, the originality of the game really shines, and it works great as a medium-length filler. Recommended unless you hate blind-bidding games.
Review Summary