Aquaretto review

Played Aquaretto today, and thought this would be a good venue for a quick writeup.

If you want a walk through of the game play, obsessed board gamers has done a decent video review; take a look.

The mechanics I liked in this game:

1. The building up and selecting of animal "trucks". - basically for each player there is a truck that holds up to 3 cards, you go around in a circle and place animals on the trucks, anyone can choose to take a truck at any point. Tile selection is one of the few random events that I really like in board games. In this case you've got the interplay between loading a truck that you wan't vs not making it too inticing for other players. Since you can't place a tile on a truck and take it in the same turn, there is a lot of posturing. It worked well.
   
2. Animal placement, and expansion of the board. Since animal's can't be directly adjacent, there are decisions to make about where you place animals, but more importantly, how much space you need to expand your collection of animals. Time is involved to make sure you expand the board where you need space for animals. I ended up expanding in the wrong direction one game, and this resulted in a glut of animals that I simply didn't have space for, but should have. This added a bit of a puzzle aspect to the game, I liked.
   

These two aspects combined to make an interesting game that you could get through in 45mins easily. The only shortcoming that I came across was that some of the professions your workers (you are awarded workers for producing 5 or more of one animal in your zoo) could be were just not as good as others. This power balance might change with more players, but in a 3 player game your optimal choices were limited. Still, we played 3 consecutive games and each one held my interest and managed to play differently. This was a good one.