Felinia
Game: Felinia with 4 players
Play: Purchase goods in the market, use the goods to board ships in the harbor, sail the ships to the neighboring island, and exchange the goods for tokens that give you points.
Art: It was pretty, but sometimes that’s not enough. There are definite problems with this game’s design - orange goods blend in with the market background; the colors on the island, the ships, and the goods are all supposed to match but they don’t at all; there are fun little images on the goods (clothes, food, wine, etc) but those images aren’t anywhere else so they’re not useful for color-blind people or when the colors are hard to distinguish.
Also, there are 3-dimensional ships that are entirely superfluous, they’re awkward, they get in the way, they’re not even particularly cute. I would prefer, instead of 3D ships with changing deck pieces to distinguish what goods go on them, they’d used just the deck pieces as flat representations of ships and made the squares indicating the goods larger and easier to see.
Conclusion: Speaking of superfluous, this game is - sort of - cat themed. The market is in the city of Katzburg and the island is Felinia and each player represents a family of - cat merchants? But it’s all in name only; none of the goods have any cat themes and all the cat stuff could vanish and it wouldn’t change the game a bit.
Overall, it was kind of mediocre. There were a lot of fiddly, over-explained rules that could be stated much clearer. Having “gold” and also “money” as separate things was perhaps not the best choice, when in many games money is gold. It took about two or so hours for a run-through with 4 beginners. It might be more fun a second time, but I’m not in a hurry to find out.
