The Voyages of Marco Polo Review

Drew

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Posted by Drew on Jun 21, 2016

Dice placement games are intriguing. They have the potential to be awesome, injecting new considerations and expanding the strategic space. But they can also increase downtime and fall into a terrible, luck-driven miasma. The Voyages of Marco Polo is firmly in the former camp and one of the best Eurogame experiences in recent memory.

Players represent merchants traveling among the cities that the great explorer reached. Each round, the players roll their dice and, in turn order, use one or more of them to take an action. In some spaces, like the market where you can gain gold, silk, pepper, or camels, higher dice are better. The higher the number, the more resources you get.


But lower dice have their place. You see, if someone else has already taken an action, you can take it too, but it will cost you. Specifically, it will cost you the value of the dice you are placing there. So if someone else already took camels and you want to take camels, it might be a good place to use a lower die and avoid exorbitant fees.

But using dice to take actions is just a part of the experience. You’ll also travel along various trade routes and establish trading posts. If you make it to Beijing, you’ll get bonus points at end-game. You’ll acquire contracts that will give points and in-game boosts for turning in specified resources. And, of course, there are special powers.

The game comes with eight potential special abilities and all of them are hugely overpowered. One power allows the player to simply select his dice values rather than rolling them. Another gives the player an extra die and a free contract every round. A third allows the player to start in Beijing (the goal city) and then work backward. These are huge rewards and the others are just as good.

All together, the game is a fantastic, interesting, and even exciting experience. Although the rolled dice do have an impact from round to round, you end up rolling enough dice and have enough options that a “bad” roll is extremely unlikely. Even if you do, the game allows you to manipulate dice by spending camels. In fact, you can even spend camels to get additional dice – and therefore additional actions – in that particular round. And a particularly low roll will award you coins or camels as compensation.

Once the round begins, you have to consider both what you want, and what your opponents want. It’s important to get in to certain spots early with your high value dice. Otherwise those big dice will mean big payments. Other actions may be less of a priority because you’ll use your low dice anyway.

As you expand your trade routes, you’ll also get access to additional actions and income. A city might provide you with an income – maybe coins or camels – and you’ll receive it every round. That right there might be worth a detour. The big cities give a bonus for the first player to reach them, but also have an action card associated with them. So you might want to get to the city just so that you can thereafter use that action. And they can be awesome. Those abilities include great ways to get income or generate points that may not be available to your opponents

Plus, every player is given two goal cards. They each have two cities on them that your explorer wants to reach. Beyond the various action cards and income tiles which are randomly placed each game, this provides yet another incentive for players to travel in routes that they might not otherwise have done.


During play, there are so many actions competing for your attention. And you always need to keep a good money supply. In a two player game, you might avoid some of the actions that the other player has taken. But with four, managing your purse is essential. Voyages provides a few main ways to get money – but all usually at significant cost in terms of actions or dice. Knowing when to spend big and when to keep a reserve will be critical in staying ahead of opponents.

Voyages of Marco Polo pulls you in all directions, then provides interesting costs and twists on each action. It allows each player a unique and overwhelming power. It provides goal cards and changes up the bonuses for traveling to various cities. That changes the path of your traveler from game to game and makes it more likely the players will get in each others’ way.

If there is a flaw in the design, I’m not sure what it is. It’s true that with common mechanics like dice placement and resource conversion it doesn’t exactly cover new ground. But it takes existing concepts and refines them into a fantastic experience. The addition of the player abilities makes everyone feel unique and powerful. The interaction between contract fulfillment and other actions is strong. And the challenge of making the best use of your roll each round is really engaging and fun. If you haven’t played this one, you absolutely should.