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For 2019, though, Winning Moves is expanding its catalog a bit, releasing a new version of Mitsuo Yamamoto's 3D-stacking game ACTOP as KOZO, for example, as well as the new 2-6 player card game Apocalyptic Picnic in which you try to keep your family from turning into zombies.
Another new release from Winning Moves is the two-player-only game Precious Cargo from Don Reid and Peter Nesbitt. In this game, each player starts with one ship with one sail on their half of the game board in the port occupied by their governor. They also have five coins as seed money, and the game is a race to be the first with 25 or more coins.
On a turn, a player moves each of their ships up to their maximum distance, which is the number of sails on the ship, which maxes out at three. After this, they take two of six different actions:
• Moving one of your ships one additional space.
• Spending three coins to build a new ship in a port where they have a governor.
• Spending one coin to add a sail to a ship in a governor-occupied port.
• Placing a governor in a port where they have a ship (and where the opponent doesn't).
• Picking up cargo from the supply chart and adding it to a ship in port, with a ship holding 1-3 cargo cubes, specifically 4 – (number of sails).
• Delivering cargo in a port on the opposite side of the board from where you picked it up.
You start with almost nothing and build from there, adding more ships or sails, while trying to monopolize the goods that earn you the most money. Each port has a random goods tile on it, and when you deliver goods to a port, all the goods of the depicted type are worth 2-4 coins, while all the other goods are worth only 1. If you deliver goods to a city with a governor, then the owner of that governor earns 1 coin for each good delivered. The port is then refreshed with a new goods tile at random.
I've played twice on a review copy from Winning Moves, and both games have gone quickly. You can earn up to ten coins on a single delivery including the governor bonus — 40% of what you need to win — so if you're not careful or the right goods tile flips into a port at the right time, an opponent can have a windfall handed to them.
My second game involved a lot more blocking, something we hadn't done in game #1. The ships move on a connected network from node to node, and they can't pass through occupied spaces. I loaded a ship with sails, then used it to harass one ship after another, causing my opponent many wasted turns as they tried to get to a port, got blocked, sailed elsewhere, got blocked again, etc. While doing this, I had scooted my other ship back and forth quickly between edge ports and piled up coins quickly before my opponent could disrupt that. Given that experience, Precious Cargo strikes me as a game that would benefit from multiple games played between the same players. The only randomness comes from the goods tile appearing in ports, so once you get a handle on movement, you'd have a better idea of what's possible over multiple turns and you'd anticipate what someone is doing based on earlier games.
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