Playtest Viktor Haag Our boardgame group played Goa last night, and while we all agreed that we liked the game, two things mystified us: The game is unreasonably long. How HiG could have advertised this as a 90 minute game was a complete mystery. We had four people at the table, all of us long-time gamers with lots of experience with German style games, and not daunted by the more complex offerings (Wallenstein, all the Alea games, Age of Steam, Liberte, Princes of Renaissance, etc). So why is it that our first game took us over three hours to complete? There was not a lot of hemming and hawing, nor did we spend more than 15 to 20 minutes learning how to play with an open read of the rulebook. We all agreed that this game is much too long, and could not see how any group of 4 could pare the playing time down to 90 minutes. At bare minimum, this would leave just over 10 minutes to accomplish all this: choose which expedition tiles to auction perform the auction for each of the five tiles in the turn have each player take an action going around the table three times have any players with extra actions perform them as desired. I would be really astonished if any group of four could complete this much play in ten minutes with anything more than a minimal amount of thought and care. There's not even a lot of overlap that can happen during the action phases, as the exact nature of what a player can do during an action is flexible (thanks to the addition of the expedition cards, expedition tiles, etc, etc). The game seemed during play to be wildly unbalanced in favour of spice production and ship production, and yet in the end the scores were closer than we might have thought. We wondered if this hadn't meant that there's not really as much strategic room in the game as one might think, and the game has a bit of "Krieg und Frieden" feel to it where it's difficult to really build and maintain a lead. We thought the starting player token was much too valuable, and it was far too easy for a pair of players to set up a purchasing cartel between the two of them (where they auction pieces effectively to one another with the money just flip-flopping between the two of them). In our game this happened about halfway through and persisted to the end, where the starting player token swapped between two players sitting next to one another - their money basically flitted back and forth as they were able to auction lots 1, 4, and 5 between the two of them. In the end, three of the four of us thought that the trick of paying money to the auctioneer created a rich-get-richer dynamic, rather like we found in Industria, another auction game we felt was rather flawed. In the longer run, we all thought we might try Goa again, and that it was a fun game, but it's most definitely not a 90 minute game, and so we have to think of it as another "Power Grid" or "Game of Thrones" type -- i.e. a one-game evening. Playing Time: Goa Kevin Whitmore I've played Goa 6 times, and enjoyed myself each playing. I agree, the game is a 2 hour game with experienced players. We also took 3 hours when learning it. Great game, in my opinion. Back to Table of Contents -- Game! # 9 To Game! List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by George Phillies. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com