Wood For Sheep: Goa

Goa is another one of my medium weight favourites.  There's so much going on in it, and even though it's a perfectly good 2 or 3 player game, it's really a game that's best with four.

The game is split into two halves, with the same structure: four rounds, each with an auction round, followed by an action round. 

In the auction round, players mark resources on the 5x5 area on the main board (typically spice plantations, but also single use spices, ships, power cards, colonists or even extra actions for use in the action round) on the shared board, and then auction them off to the table at large, in a single pass.  That is, you get one chance to bid on each lot, with the auctioneer of each lot getting the last chance to outbid the current high bid.   When players buy their own lots, the money goes into the supply, and out of the economy... making the remaining cash left on the table more valuable.  If a player buys someone elses lot, money changes hands immediately, so it's possible for an early auctioneer to sell for a lot of money, and to then leverage it against later rounds of bidding.  This auction style also means that it's possible for one player to win several lots, and for players to possibly miss out on gaining resources.

 In the action round, players take turns executing 3 actions, using "extra actions" if they've acquired them along the way.  Each of the first actions corresponds to one of the columns, from left to right, players acquire more ships, spices, money, cards, or colonies.  The last action is to spend spices and ships (ostensibly moving a load of spices back to Portugal for glory or whatever), in order to increase the effectiveness of one of the other actions, and to gain victory points.  For example, this player has spent no spices on ships, as his cube is at the top of the "ships" column on the far left, but his "spices" column (next to ships) is all the way down at the bottom.  If you level up all your abilities same rate, you can earn extra action cards, and the first player to make it to each of the boxes in the bottom two rows will earn a power card.  These two mechanics give incentive for the player to either generalize or specialize respectively, and encourage differing strategies over multiple playthroughs.

There is a fair amount of randomness in the game, in the layout of resource tiles for auction and the power card deck.  However, the randomness doesn't cause imbalance in the game and good planning and measured decisions will beat lucky card draws 9 times out of ten. The auction lends a lot of player based tension in a game that can otherwise play like multiplayer solitaire.  Ultimately, this game is mostly about efficiency and economy... how well you can influence the in game economy and spend your resources for maximum effect. The "RPG" element of leveling up your abilities was fairly unique for this type of game (i.e. non-dungeon crawlers) at the time it was originally published, and it a major draw for the  min/maxers among us.

Overall, it's a great game with a lot of interesting mechanics that dovetail very nicely with one another and every serious boardgamer should give it at least a play or two.