:strip_icc()/pic4220862.jpg)
/pic4122624.png)
I'm not sure that this statement holds for all games, but for many designs it does. The scoring system determines who wins a competitive game, so if players are trying to win (and let's assume they are), then they will take actions that they think maximize their score by the end of play. They might make the wrong moves, of course, or be misguided in their actions because they don't anticipate the countermoves that others can make, but everything that happens during the game is based on how things get tallied in the end.
This explains why Blue Lagoon, a Reiner Knizia design that Blue Orange Games will debut at Gen Con 2018 (and the European branch of Blue Orange will have at SPIEL '18), feels like an alternate Earth version of Through the Desert, which debuted two decades ago in 1998. At heart, both designs are incredibly simple, with most player actions consisting only of the extension of something already on the board: I had two orange camels in a caravan, and now I have three. I had a sailor off the shore of an island, and now I have a settler on that island. You progress in the most minute way possible. Atomistic advancements!
Yet those placements are driven by the goals of the games. In Through the Desert, you want to claim watering holes, reach oases, secure territory, and maximize your caravans compared to other nomadic leaders; in Blue Lagoon, you want to claim resources, reach new islands, secure paths connecting islands, and maximize your presence on those islands compared to that of other Polynesian leaders. The feel of the games is the same — slowly I advanced, step by step, inch by inch — yet not because you have different goals in mind as you advance.
Staking out ground in the first few turns
The most striking difference between the two designs is that Blue Lagoon is a game in two acts. In Act One, not only can you place a settler or village next an existing settler or village of your color, but you can also drop a sailor of your color onto an unoccupied water space. New territory! Fresh grounds to explore! You can set up new footholds all over the board to expand into new land, and indeed you must do so in order to do well in the scoring.
What's more, after you score at the end of Act One, all of the sailors and settlers are removed from the board and returned to the players, with only placed villages remaining behind. Act Two feels like TTD proper because you can place your sailor and settler tokens only adjacent to your villages or to tokens that you placed earlier in the act. The tricky aspect of Act Two is that it all depends on what you did in Act One, and instead of placing all of your nomadic leaders at once, you can place those villages throughout Act One, allowing you to claim ground early or respond many turns later to where someone else placed their village. This ability to place early or respond later — while also fighting for all the points — gives the first half of the game a more challenging feel than TTD, while still not making it more complicated, which is a fascinating achievement!
I know that some folks still pine for the days of classic Knizia, but those classics are still being created in the modern day, and thanks to the Moana-ish look of the packaging, the game will probably introduce far more players to this style of game than something more serious-looking would have. Blue Orange Games pulled off a similar trick in 2017 with Hjalmar Hach's Photosynthesis, which disguised a perfect information, abstract game with pretty trees and friendly colors. I know that BOG co-founder Thierry Denoual is a huge fan of abstract strategy games, with his company having released new versions of Six Making and Gyges, for example, and I look forward to seeing future releases along these lines!
:strip_icc()/pic4216107.png)
/pic3563904.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic4216112.png)
:strip_icc()/pic4212613.jpg)
