8.5
Ports: A Game of Battles with Boats (2023)
Merchants battle for power over the river.
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2 Players
30-120 Min
Age: 3+
Complexity: --
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Ports is a game about abstracted trade between two city-states along a life-giving river. The genesis of the game was as a chess mini-game in an RPG, but it quickly became more interesting than its container. It plays similar to traditional race games such as Backgammon, Sennet, and the Royal Game of Ur, with its canonical theme being trade and privateers competing on a Nile-type river.
On a fish-shaped board, there are two ports on one side and a winding river that overlaps itself that connects the two. Each player starts with three merchant ships in their port and there are two reinforcements for each player on the island in the middle of the river. Each player rolls four binary dice in order to move their ships along the river, ultimately to the other player's port. If one player's boat lands the other's boat, then they roll to see who wins the battle and whose boat needs to retreat to their original port. Whoever gets three boats to their opponent's port first wins!
—description from the designer
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