LogFAQs > #933992908

44. Karuba (2015)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Tile-laying, point-to-point movement, racing
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 15 minutes
Experience: 10+ games over 4-6 sessions with 3-4 players (2016-2019)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 49/80 (2018)

Summary - You have an unfilled 4x5 grid of an island and four explorers. The four explorers start on the western and northern edges, while the respective temples they must reach are on the eastern and southern borders. From there, each player has a stack of identical tiles. One "leader" draws a tile randomly from their stack, and then everyone finds their corresponding identical tile and either lays it or discards it to move an explorer down a track. The game ends when all the tiles are drawn or when one player has moved all their explorers to their corresponding temples. You can also pick up jewels on the way. You get points for the jewels or for getting to each temple fastest.

Design - Karuba is perhaps the least interactive game left on this list, with one or two exceptions. It is literally multiplayer solitaire and could easily be compared to a roll-and-write type; if you refuse to look at your opponents' boards, it literally is purely solitary. That's probably the first thing to accept about Karuba: the lack of competitiveness.

That said, as its own unique puzzle-generator, good god it's addictive. The positions of the explorers and temples are randomized each time, and the moment you draw your first tile, you're able to start making meaningful decisions. You'd always want the dream of having a beautiful, efficient path with minimal branches so your explorers can share their exploration, but in reality, you'll draw those tiles out of sequence, you'll want the gems, and you'll need to burn some tiles just to get your guys moving. Sometimes your guys will move smoothly along, and sometimes they'll crash into each other, and sometimes you'll in effect block off temples from ever being reachable. Are you waiting for the perfect piece so you can set your explorers on their path? It may never come! Sometimes you just lay pieces and have no perfect plan. But before you know it, the game is ending and you've made a mess but achieved some stuff and... ah, let's just play it again!

Experience - Played this game like four, five, six times in one glorious weekend during GenCon 2016, when I was introduced to it. Tons of heavier options, but this game was so quick and addictive that it captured many of our attention and wound up arguably stealing the show. It has mostly sat on various shelves since then, but it came out again last year and was good for two or three more straight adventures.

Future - Probably the multiplayer solitaire game I'd most like to replay! I don't own a copy, but playing this game is like playing Tetris. Thankfully (?) it has some controls in place, as setup is a little cumbersome.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness