WBG Score: 8
Player Count: 2-5
You’ll like this if you like: Libertalia, Citadel, Santo Domingo
Published by: Studio H
Designed by: Olivier Cipière
This is a free review copy. See our review policy here
Vaalbara is, according to the rulebook, an as yet undiscovered continent and not the nickname of the local pub landlady who has a penchant for banning the locals (Val barrer?No...? Fine I’ll get on with the review)
How to discover a continent.
To set up separate out all the land cards relevant to your player count, shuffle them and place as many cards as you have players in a row. Then set out another row behind those. Place the rest of the deck behind those rows face down and orientate them so that the grey triangle points to the right. Then give everyone two victory points and their deck of 12 cards which they’ll then shuffle and draw 5.
On a turn everyone will pick one card from their hand to play face down. Everyone reveals their cards and places them in ascending order. In the case of any ties look at the top card of the face down land cards. It’ll show each of the colours in a descending order and the leftmost player colour will have their card go before the other/s. This is why the orientation of the deck matters.
In ascending order players will trigger their cards' effect and then take a land card from the front row of cards to be placed in front of them and then score it immediately. Each type of land card will score differently.
Forrest’s are straight up points.
Meadows get you 1 point for each one in your and your neighbours realms.
Mountains gain 10 if you have two or 20 if you have four.
Fields get you 2 points per field in your realm including the one you just played. Villages get you 2 per different land in your realm.
Rivers get you points equal to the card number you played (max 6) multiplied by the number of rivers in your realm.
At the end of a round slide the back row of land cards forward and then fill in the back row. Players draw back up to five cards and you go again. After 9 rounds total up your points. If at the end of the game you have 5 different lands you score 5 points, or if you have 6 different lands you score 10.
Choose your role
Do you remember the game where you realised that a particular mechanism clicked with you? Was there a particular tussle in an area control game or a particular combo you set off in a deck builder where you had that eureka moment that made you want to start buying as many of those games as you possibly can? Well in the case of simultaneous role/card selection games (there’s gotta be a better descriptor for it out there) Vaalbara was that game for me.
There’s something about this genre of games that I find kind of infuriating but also really tense and fun in the same way you might find a game of poker but without the massive dip in your bank account afterwards (note to self: get better at poker) That moment as you carefully work out your plan for the round, pick your card and dubiously place it face down on the table just hoping that someone else hasn’t foiled your best laid plans. Then the tense waiting and the reveal as you find out if you’ve even got any chance at all of your plan working, or if someone has had a better plan than you. Even worse, they’ve had the same idea but they happen to be the one winning the tie this round. That one little card flip can be the line between a low scoring round or a high scoring round. Having played quite a few games with this mechanism I've really come to love it…..for the most part, there’s been one exception so far.
12 explorers of such lethal cunning.
In Vaalbara you’ve only got 12 cards in your deck but all of them are good. There’s none that I look at when they come into my hand where I think urgh, why is this even in here. However, they’re not all going to be good all the time, some are quite situational, but they’re not going to be so situational that you’ll only play them once in a blue moon. For example, the carpenter is going to get you 3 points per Forrest in your realm which is mainly going to get played over something else if you’ve got a few forests. Some cards let you swap cards from your realm or the deck or even swap between rows and here’s where a touch of “hate swapping” if that’s a thing, comes in. Generally you’ll be doing it to help yourself but now and then swapping out a mountain that you know someone else wants is pretty fun.
Some cards will have you getting a reward depending on where you come in the turn order, or which cards your neighbours play and these are some of the most tense in the game because they’re always a gamble. They can be genuine mini nail biters. A lovely little touch with these cards is that you’ll only be against your two neighbours which means that the odds won’t change across the player counts except for two players
Carpenter No 5
The low and high initiative cards have a great risk/reward factor to them. The lower cards (meaning you’ve more chance of going first) will generally give things to other players but it may just be worth it to get what you want. The higher cards have the better benefits. The Farmer, No 12 (which incidentally isn’t a follow up to Mambo No 5) lets you double the rewards of the land you take but is like the famous box of chocolate as in, you never know what you're gonna get.
One game Vaalbara frequently gets compared to is Libertalia and even though I like that game, one thing it does that I find fiddly (I’ve only played the new Winds of Galecrest) is the tie breaker. I know they’ve made it easier for the new version but for some reason my brain still has trouble figuring out which way it reads, I know this is probably more a me problem. Regardless, Vaalbara takes out any uncertainty and makes tie breakers nice and simple. You look at the card on top of the deck which has a colour sequence and there’s your tiebreaker. I love it.
This does bring me to one of my little issues with the game and that’s determining colours. Every card in every deck is only discernible by its card back meaning that when you check for tiebreakers and even when you need to see who’s card is next (because I guarantee you’ll forget) you need to turn the cards over. Now I know this is a little niggle and it takes a second to flip a card over, but I think just the addition of a symbol in the player colour on the front of the card would have made things so much smoother. They’ve added this to the cards on board game arena and it doesn’t cover any of the game's beautiful artwork.
In exploration, there’s safety in numbers.
The two player game falls a little flat for me because you’ve now only got that 50/50 chance of one of those “before your neighbour” cards working or failing and it makes it a little less interesting for me and I think that’s the best way to describe the two player game. There are also cards that don’t work quite as well, or are just less interesting in general. The fighter #1 (as mentioned previously) is now not worth keeping in your hand to rack up points since at best you’ll only get one out of it. The bard (#2 give two points to a player of your choice) and the falconer (#6 steal two from the player who played before you) can easily turn into a back and forth coin swap. I much prefer the better choice of lands you get with more players, it just makes for a more interesting decision over the cards you play and the land you could get. This decision gets better as the player count scales up which makes this a game that I’d much rather play with as many as I can and I honestly think that 3 may be my minimum player count for this one.
The box for Vaalbara looks cool. It’s got this drawer that pulls out that makes access to the game quicker and whilst it’s a cool concept, it’s one big flaw is that, like any drawer that’s put on its side, it slides out. It doesn’t take much for someone to accidentally pick the game up by the wrong end and before you know it the game you took such joy in packing away so quickly, has deposited itself on your floor and now you're playing hunt the coin.
On the subject of coins, I don’t love them and most of the people I’ve played this with haven't either. Coins are great in most games but because here you’re constantly taking coins and changing them up every round it just feels fiddly and annoying, especially as everyone is trying to do the same thing at the same time. I’d much rather there was some kind of scoring dial. I know it’d add to the cost of what is essentially a £20 game but I think it’d make for a much smoother experience.
What, no Dora?
If I’m looking to get my role selection, Libertalia style fix but in a smaller box and in around half an hour then Vaalbara is the first game I’m going to grab. In fact, I may even go to grab it over some of the others regardless! Now if we could just get a Dora the explorer expansion pack?