Macao Game Review

MACAO GAME REVIEW

 Macao is now a Chinese city, but in the 17th century it was a Portuguese colony and major trading center. In Macau, players take on the role of Portuguese adventurers, improving the city's infrastructure, collecting valuable goods, and then trading them across Europe, striving to become the most prestigious adventurers of their time.

 Macao is played over twelve rounds. At first glance, it seems like a game with a mix of mechanics: a bit of board building, a bit of pick-and-drop, and a bit of territory control. But Macau is actually, for lack of a better term, a turn-based game.

 At the beginning of each round of the game, five different colored dice are rolled and placed in the center of the playing field. Players then choose two of these dice to collect the dice. The color of the collected dice is the same as the color of the selected die. The number of dice collected is determined by a value. But more importantly, this value also determines how many turns the players will have to wait before they can access the collected dice. After players have collected their dice, their player components, called "wind roses", take their turn, and the dice in the next area of the wind rose become available to them for that turn.

 These dice are spent on improving your city and collecting goods by buying up city blocks, fighting for position in turn order, moving your player marker along the wall, activating cards and paying for their abilities, and moving your ship along waterways to deliver the goods you collect. In the style of Stefan Feld, Macau is a game full of opportunities to earn victory points, and almost everything you can do will result in you earning them at various stages of the game. And whoever has the most points at the end of the game wins.

 There are many more in-depth details that I will cover soon. This is just a general overview of the game. If you think you have heard enough and just want to know my opinion, feel free to skip to the Opinions section. Otherwise, read on and I will give you a brief rundown of how it is played in Macau.

ANCHORS

 Macao is organized as follows:

 After placing the main board on the table, the 24 Office cards are shuffled and two are placed face up along the outer edges of the board for each round of play. The remaining cards are shuffled into a deck and placed side by side. The Goods tiles are shuffled and one is randomly placed on each of the city blocks. The Joker tiles are also placed in the marked positions. The beige discs are placed next to the Tribute track. The remaining components—the dice (which can be sorted if you like, but I just keep mine in a large bowl) and the coins—are placed within reach.

 Next, each player chooses a color and receives tokens of the chosen color, including a compass rose, a ship, two discs, a table, and twelve possession markers. In addition, each player receives five gold. The player's tokens are placed on the wall and prestige track. His ship is placed on one of the positions.

 Now that you have done that, choose the order of play in some way and arrange the players' discs on the wall in the order you have chosen, from top to bottom. From now on, the player whose disc is furthest along the wall and on top will be the first player for the current round. Second, third, and fourth are determined in the same way - furthest in front and closest to the top of any piles.

 In turn, each player will choose a card from a small selection of cards. This card is placed on their table. Each player also receives one die of their choice, which must be placed next to the one-dot area on their wind horn, and two dice of matching colors, which must be placed next to the two-dot area. You are now ready to play Macau.

CUBISM

 In Macao, you live and die by your compass rose. So before I delve further into the gameplay, it's important to understand how the compass rose works.

 Your compass rose is divided into seven sections. Six of them contain a picture of a die set to a different point value (from one to six), and the seventh contains a picture of a large arrow. Collected dice are placed in the area next to the compass rose adjacent to the value of the die used to collect them.

 To better illustrate this, consider the following example: A player chooses a red three and a blue four as his dice. He takes three red dice from the supply and places them next to the compass rose area that represents the three-dot die. The four blue dice are placed next to the face of the four-dot die.

 After choosing the dice and collecting the dice, each player turns their compass rose. The arrow will then point to the dice available to the player in the current round. If there are no dice, the player takes a penalty marker, which will cost them three points at the end of the game.

 So, choosing higher value dice will give you a lot of dice in future rounds, but you can't completely ignore lower value rounds without risking penalties. This is the lifeblood of Macau. But as important as it is, there are many other considerations.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

 Before the dice are rolled at the beginning of a round, there is a card phase. In this phase, four cards are drawn from the deck and added to the two cards set aside in preparation for the current round. These cards have a tribute value in the lower right corner and a coin value in the lower left corner. These values are added up and the beige Tribute track discs on the main board are placed accordingly.

 This means that during their turn, the player can purchase the amount of Prestige on the right by paying an amount of gold equal to the value on the left. This is one consideration, and it is risky. Do you pay the amount being asked now for the reward offered, or do you hold on to your money (and money is very tight in Macau!) in the hope of an even better deal that may never come along later?

 Once the Tribute Track is sorted, players take turns, in the order they draw, choosing one of the cards to place on their table. Each card has a cube value required to move it from the player's table to their active card area. Each player's table can only hold five cards. If the table is already full when a player chooses a card to place on it, one of the cards in the table is discarded to make room for a new card, and the player receives a penalty token, which, you guessed it, is worth minus three points at the end of the game. This is another point to consider. Cards that are harder to play usually have stronger abilities. How many of these do you want to take on?

 After the card phase is complete, dice are rolled, dice are collected, and compass roses are turned (which may result in penalty tokens) as described earlier. The action phase then begins. During their turns, players may spend dice on:

 – move your marker along the wall to control the order of turns.

 – buy one city block by paying its cost and replacing the goods tile on it with one of your property markers.

 – move your ship one space along the waterways one space for each die spent. If a player lands their ship in a port for which they have the appropriate goods(s), they deliver them to the port (starting with the highest value space) and receive Prestige for doing so.

 – activate any cards that have been removed from their tableau into the active cards area, and for which they have the required dice. Such cards are usually rewarded with prestige or coins in exchange for certain dice.

 Sometimes you only have a very few dice at your disposal. In such cases, choosing what to do with them is quite simple, since you have few options. But there will be many cases where these decisions will be difficult.

 To better understand why these decisions can be difficult, let's talk about scoring.

PRESTIGE

 In Macau, prestige is gained from a variety of sources. Some of it will be earned throughout the game for various cards activated, goods delivered, or the tribute scale. However, a significant percentage of it will be accrued for the final game scores.

 At the end of the game, you'll earn points for the largest cluster of property tokens in the city—two points for each cluster—and take a penalty token for each card left on your table. There are also many cards that, when activated, will also earn you end-game points.

 The person with the most prestige wins, and ties are broken by the person furthest away from the wall.

CONCLUSIONS

 As I thought about Macau and how it made me feel, I came to a strange realization. For a game I love so much, I have a lot of negative reviews. For example:

 – Nowhere in the game (not in the components or the rulebook) does the game explain the different types of goods. They are labeled on the cards, but there are no accompanying illustrations to explain what they are for. Do you have a card that gives you extra points every time you deliver lacquerware? Good luck figuring out what that good is. I think it's the red one that looks like a bunch of vases? Then again, there are blue and white ones that look like Delftware. So maybe that's them? Or maybe it's the one with the green plate. Who knows?

 – Macao has some of the cheapest and lowest quality components I've ever encountered. This isn't so much the game's fault as the publisher's. In my experience with older Alea games, this kind of "skill reduction" seems to be the norm rather than the exception.

 – The tribute table is so random that some games go by without using it. And that seems strange to me. In a well-balanced game, there should never be any aspect of it that feels irrelevant. Yet the tribute table often is.

 – Aside from a few cards that reward their owners for doing so, there’s little incentive to move along a wall other than to go first. In fact, most games I play involve very little movement along a wall. Often the only reason someone moves along a wall is because it’s their only option to spend the one die they’re holding. It’s more of an afterthought than a deliberate choice.

 – Macao has a lot of frustrating moves where you have no dice and nothing to do. Part of this is due to poor planning. But a lot of it is due to the random nature of the dice rolls combined with the random nature of the card draws. So it’s important to go first because you’ll be the first to access the bad cards that fate has dealt you.

 – Some of the terminology used in the game is illogical and often leads to confusion. For example, consider the idea of a “table”. In most games, your table is a group of cards or tiles that you have collected in front of you and that you actively use to perform certain actions. But not so in Macau. In Macau, having too many cards on your table can hurt you, and you should activate them as soon as possible.

 And that word “activate”? I have a problem with that too. When I think of “activate,” I mean “use the ability of a thing.” So when you see a card in a game that triggers whenever you “activate” a certain type of card, you might be tempted to think that the card will reward you every time that said type of card is used for whatever it’s used for. But you’d be wrong. That card only triggers whenever you move that type of card from your tableau to the active card area. It’s not nearly as useful as you thought!

 – The idea that goods you've collected from a city magically appear on your boat mid-voyage is an obscene thematic question. I guess 17th century Portuguese sailors had teleportation devices on their sailing ships?

 – But my biggest gripe with Macao is the one thing that really sets it apart from any other game: the compass rose. It’s very easy to forget to turn the compass rose, and if you do move it, it’s not uncommon to forget which round it’s supposed to be in. There have been many games where we’ve come close to the last round or two and one of the players has either too many compass rose areas left or not enough. This happens so often that I’ve developed a simple tool (I’m no graphic design expert) to help keep track of this, which you can find here: Macao Compass Rose Pad.

 All things considered, I think Macau is a fantastic game. Whether I simply see the designer's intentions as flaws or whether those flaws are unintentional, the end result is the same: every game of Macau presents me with a unique and challenging puzzle to overcome. Every decision I'm forced to make makes me worry that maybe I've done the wrong thing. Every risky move (like praying that one of the dice will come up with a one, so that there's something in my one-dot area and I can avoid a penalty) keeps me on edge, hoping that my luck will pay off. When it doesn't, it always brings a groan. And there's no denying the sheer pleasure of starting a turn with twenty or more dice at your disposal.

 It's in moments like these that Stefan Feld excels. He has a knack for creating games that snowball into amazing and unforgettable twists. Overall, the feeling of those moments trumps everything else. When I'm not actively playing a game, it's easy to pick at its frayed edges to watch it unravel. But when I'm in the thick of it, I don't think about any of that. I'm just having a ton of fun.

 I'm glad I came across someone selling it back in 2017, and I'm glad I had $80 to spare at the time. Macau quickly became one of my all-time favorite felds and remains so to this day. Give it a try, and I think you'll agree.