INTRODUCTION
Designer: <PERSON>, <PERSON>
Publisher: Z-Man, Amigo Spiele
Year: 2003
Players: 3-5
Time: Just over an hour
Recommended Age: 10 and up.
Santiago is one of the most pleasant looking games you’ll come across. The box is a soothing teal colour and the front picture shows a serene pastoral landscape. A few people are working in the lush fields in the background, an irrigation channel supplies plenty of water, and the sky is a calm blue. A man and a donkey gaze happily straight ahead as if to welcome you into their world. This world is Santiago, a Cape Verde Island several miles west of the African mainland.
There are, however, a couple of hints that something more sinister is going on. First, the fellow on the front cover is smiling just a little too much, and has a gleam in his eye that spells trouble. Second, the quotation on under the title is rather suggestive: "The water flows where the money goes!"
As it turns out, that phrase describes this game very well. This game is about bribery, about negotiation and broken promises. Santiago is about watering fields of peppers, bananas, sugar cane, and so on, but there is only so much water, and the canal-overseer must be bribed to make the water come your way!
Santiago is one of my favourite negotiation games, and that’s why I want to share with you how the game works, what makes it great, and why you too might like it.
COMPONENTS
When you first open the box you may be slightly underwhelmed. This is what you get:
Let’s look a little more closely. There are some wooden pieces. The cubes are workers and the long narrow sticks are canals (each player also has a "proposal canal" in her colour). The round blue marker is the spring from which the water initially comes:
We also have a bunch of plantation tiles. There are a total of five crops: bananas, sugar cane, peppers, potatoes, and beans. Each crop has 9 tiles. Three of these show room for one worker, and six can have two workers.
We also get some nice paper money, which comes in various denominations. The currency is called the "escudo" and you start with ten of them. Makes sure you keep your money hidden as you don’t want others to know how much money you have available for a bribe.
Then there’s the canal overseer, the guy who needs to be bribed. Here he is:
There are also a few palm trees. These are only used for a variant, but you might as well know what you’re getting:
Lastly, there’s the game board. 84
Why am I mentioning it only now? Because it’s the dullest board you’ll likely ever come across. It’s basically just a grid, with room for plantation tiles and canals. However, by the end of the game it will look pretty and colourful. That is, if things actually get watered...
THE RULES
The rules are quite easy. Every round you auction off as many plantation tiles as players (the exception is the three player game, but you’ll have to read up on that yourself). These then receive workers on them. After that the fields need to be watered, but only one canal is placed per round. A round of bribing the canal-overseer takes place to see where he will place the canal. The game has eleven rounds (eleven canals), nine in a 5-player game.
Before we get to the details, it’s helpful to know how the scoring works. At the end of the game all the fields that are irrigated earn the players money. Basically, tally up the numbers of workers you have in a field and times that by the number of plantation tiles in a field. Let’s take an example:
Have a look at the field of bananas on the right. Black has three workers and there are six tiles. So that makes 18 escudos. It’s that easy. Note that some of the fields are not connected to each other. The big banana field breaks up the two sugar cane fields (light green). There are also four tiles on the board that are not irrigated. Can you spot them? They’ve been flipped upside down. On the whole this picture suggests that a fairly peaceable game took place - most tiles were watered.
Now that you understand the scoring, let’s go through the 6 phases that take place each turn:
New plantation tiles are turned over and are bid on. Bids start to the left of the canal overseer. 349