Show Boat- a player's review
by Paul Dent. Sat 13 SeptThis is Robin’s latest offering, and, at the risk of offering up a massive ‘spoiler’, it’s excellent.
Interestingly, we elected to play the hard core version, which Robin had yet to test ‘in anger’. The idea is that up to 6 players (and there were 6 of us), are owners of a Show Boat that plies its trade along the Mississippi during a 36 week period (Spring through Summer and then Autumn), first travelling downstream, and then filling in the gaps at the cities back upstream. The movement mechanic, affected by the monthly weather changes, worked really well, though coming upstream made the additional movement cards even more valuable. Overall winner determined by the most money.
With only 4 actions available, a player’s turn was pretty ‘snappy’, so even at 6 players there was very little downtime.
Despite an untested ‘hard core’ playthrough, Robin made virtually no notes on how things could be improved, which is testament to the clean and simple ruleset. One particularly mechanic of note, is the determination of turn order. All I will say is that it can change mid round, and has a juicy ‘take that’ element. It’s fairly brutal, but thematically valid. We all loved it.
There may well be a need to change the way some of the scoring of the packet delivery cards works, as clearly they are flawed because I won! Having said that, with experienced players, there might be more attention paid to what other players are doing, and take moves to counter it. Definitely worth playing again to see.
Overall, it is excellent, and a lot better than many other games that seem to get a lot of attention in the market. “Bring on the Dancing Girls”, I say!