Island Fever

I thought I would give my first impression of the new Stephen Dorra’s new game Kreta. In Kreta you are playing to control the islands of Crete. It’s a straightforward area control game, with a few twists.

The board is the island of Crete that is broken up into several different regions. Each region includes one type of farmable resource, which I believe there are 5 types (Cheese, Wheat, Grapes, Olives, and Thyme). Sounds like a Simon and Garfunkel song eh? Each region has different VP values ranging from 2-5. Also the regions are broken up in borders that each vertices is numbered 1-26. However there are only 11 rounds, so only 11 of these areas will be scored in a game. Also on the board evenly disturbed to every third or forth region are seaports.

Players all start with a few different objects. Villages, Villagers, Ships, Forts, and one Abbot. These are the things that sway influence on each region you put them. The player also gets a deck of character cards that will be used during each of his turns.

Game play is pretty straightforward. On players turn he chooses one of his character cards and plays it’s action as long as the action is valid. The seven actions are as follows:

Admiral: Place a ship or move up to two ships on the board. A max of two ships my be in any one harbor on the board.

Commander: Add a villager to the board, or move any number of villagers up to 4 total spaces. This can be broken up into several villagers.

Abbot: Place an abbot on the board, or move the abbot 3 spaces.

Farmer: If a player controls a villager and a ship in one region, he may “farm” a resource chip on that region. Harvesting give you one VP for each of the same type. i.e harvesting one cheese give you one vp, harvesting the second cheese give you two more, and so on.

Architect: Build a fort or build a village (Up to the number of farmed resources a player has)

King: Mirror the action of a card that that player has already played.

Castellan: Initiate a scoring round. Choose the next rounds card.

There are 11 rounds in the game. The players can see the next round of scoring and possibly the round after. The goal is to create the majority of influence in a region that will be scored next. The scoring cards match the numbers of the vertices on the board. So each region that touches the vertices are scored, which is between 2-3 regions. The player that has the most influence, get the points that are marked in that region (ties share the full amount) and second place gets half rounded down. Therefore you spend the game moving around or placing these items on the board so that you can have influence as high as possible in each scoring region.

There are a few caveats. One is the abbot. When a player places an abbot in a region, it only allows himself to place Villages or Villagers in that region. Other players that wish to build there will now have to spend a turn to place their own abbot in that region. Second it the castellan. Each player may only play each character once until the castellan is played, at which point a scoring happens, and each player takes back all the character cards. A second thing the player who played the castellan card gets is a chance to select the next round card. He chooses the face up card and either keeps it for the next round OR he may discard it and take the next card in the draw pile. So this makes for some interesting player screwage.

Game play. I liked the game; it’s very straightforward play. I did however notice that there are some regions that I would consider POWER regions. One that scores the max of 5 points has 6 vertices, one of the players established a clear majority early in the game, and it scored 5/6 times for a whopping 25 points. So I think for plays after this initial play we are going to see more contention for those “power” areas. But besides that it’s a solid playing game. The flow is smooth. You spend the game trying to find ways to edge in the majority before someone pulls the castellan trigger. Lots of give and take. I liked my first playing. I give this Dorra a thumbs up.