Karuba

27th October 2020

Tuesday evening is here and I'm at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club.

Time for the first game of the evening; Karuba.

​Have you fancied yourself as an explorer just landed on some unmapped jungle island? Well in Karuba you control not just 1 explorer, but 4! All in a rush from beach to jungle in order to find temples, treasure and ultimately glory first before everybody.

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What's in a game?

• Player boards: All player boards have 30 spaces in a 6x5 grid. Half of the grid's perimeter is bordered by the beach and the half by the jungle. Each half of these perimeter's is numbered (In increments of 10.) from 10 to 110, these numbers represent compass degrees. There is little artwork here, but what there is, is nice enough
• Path tiles: Each player has 36 identical numbered tiles. Each tile shows a path or a junction. Some tiles will also display a gold or diamond symbol.
• Meeples: Each player has identical tokens, 4 sets of an explorer and a temple, in 4 colours. These are nice wooden tokens.
• Gold and diamonds: Shiny and translucent little plastic tokens are used to represent gold nuggets and diamonds.
• Scoring tokens: There are 4 sets of 4 scoring tokens in the same 4 colours as the meeples. Iin each set of tokens they are worth from 2 to 5 points.

There's not much to be said about the components. The meeples are good classic wooden tokens and the gold and diamonds are a nice touch too. The rest of the components are well made and sturdy.

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Player board.

Gold, diamonds & scoring tokens.

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How's it play?
Set up
The set up for Karuba very straightforward, if a tiny bit time consuming.

• First choose 1 player as a 'caller'.
• Starting with the caller and clockwise order, each player will put a single explorer down in a beach space numbered from 10 to 110 on their player board, at the edge of the grid. All other players must also put down an explorer of the same colour on the same space on their own player boards. Then the player puts down a temple in the same colour as the explorer, but in one of the jungle spaces numbered from 10 to 110 instead; the only restriction is that it cannot be less than 3 spaces away from the same coloured explorer. Again all other players follow suit. Continue until all explorers and temples have been placed. All players should now have all their meeples in identical spaces.
• The caller is given their set of 36 tiles, these should be shuffled and placed into a face-down stack.
• All remaining players should place their tiles face-up in numerical order around their board so that they can be easily found.
• Gold, diamonds should be placed in an easily accessible spot for all players.
• The amount and value of scoring tokens used will be dependant on the number of player. 1 face-up stack in each colour should be created, with highest value token on top and lowest at the bottom. All 4 stacks should placed in a spot easily reached by all players.

Now were're ready to go.

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Tiles set up and ready to use.

Meeples.

Temples

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Gameplay for is very straightforward. Players are trying to move their explorers to the temple of the same colour. Unsurprisingly, this is done by laying tiles and moving the explores along the paths that are created.
Karuba has no turns, everyone makes their choices at the same time.

• The caller will have a stack of face-down tiles. They turn over the top tile and announce the tile's number to all other players. The other players should then find and pick up their matching tile. Now all players have to make 1 of 2 decisions: Lay tile or discard tile to move explorer.
• Lay tile: If a player chooses this option, they must put the tile on to a grid. There is only one rule; tiles cannot be rotated, the number in the corner of tile must always be upwards. Other than this, any placement is ok, you do not have to connect it to another tile or path, you can create dead-ends or block other routes off or send a route off the grid, remember the only player you can screw over... is yourself. Finally if the tile has a gold or diamond symbol on it, then place a corresponding token on to it.
• Discard tile to move: If a player discards a tile, then they can move an explorer along a number of tiles equal to the number of exits on the discarded tile. Thus a straight or bend confers 2 movement points, a T-junction confers 3 and crossroad -4. There are some rules here: Only 1 explorer can be moved, the movement points cannot be split between explorers, an explorer cannot pass through a tile that is already occupied by another explorer nor can they end the round there. If an explorer moves on to a tile with a gold or diamond token on it, the player can choose to pick it up, picking the treasure up ends the explorer's movement irrespective of any remaining movement points.
• Once all players have finished playing a tile or moving explorers. A new round begins and the caller draws another tile.
• When an explorer reaches their temple (By moving off the grid and onto the temple's space.) they collect the topmost scoring token in the same colour as their explorer/temple. If two or more players reach the same coloured temple in the same turn, they all score according to the topmost token, players who take the lower value tokens also take diamonds to make up the difference.

Endgame
Play continues until one player has moved all 4 of their explorers to the relevant temples, or as is more likely until the caller has depleted their entire stack.

Players add the points of all the scoring tokens they've collected and the gold and diamond tokens, gold is worth 2 points and diamonds 1 point.
​Highest score wins.

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My board at the end of the game.

The treasure I'd accumulated.

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Overall

Despite the simplicity of the rules, Karuba gives players lots of decisions to make nearly all the time.
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The most common of these is whether to play a tile or discard it for movement.

This is a very elegant mechanic, the best tile to build paths with is the crossroads, because it gives you the most options. But the crossroad is also the best tile to discard for movement, as it give you most movement. 

Early in the game, you'll obviously be wanting to play the tiles more often to build up your paths, but you can't afford to play them willy-nilly. A meandering path is something players will want to avoid.
You may end up putting tiles in seemingly unconnected, random places, hoping to get the right tiles later on!
Players have limited rounds in Karuba and will want to build their paths as efficiently as possible. The game has an absolute maximum of 36 rounds.

If you look the photo of my gameboard from the end of the game. All 36 tiles were drawn. This means  I played 19 tiles, which means I moved 17 times, whilst I managed to get 3 explorers to their destination, the blue explorer barely managed to leave their starting spot.

Movement may also provide difficult decisions.
For example; you may have an explorer who is just 1 step away from a treasure or a temple but have just drawn a crossroads tile which grants you 4 movement, using it on 1 movement can be a waster. Do you use it to move another explorer to maximise it's value, or do you use 1 movement to complete an objective and waste the rest of the movement?
Also, when moving explorers, players will need think ahead a little, a badly placed explorer can block their colleagues, meaning it might require an entire round to clear the path.

Only towards the end of the game, when I had connected everything up and reached 2 temples, did the decisions become no-brainers. But because the game is played simultaneously and other players were more or less in the same situation: There was little downtime between rounds, which passed very quickly.

Karuba is a quick game to play anyway, if a player spends 1 minute deciding their move, the game has a play time of 36 minutes.

The only small criticism I could level at Karuba is that there is no interaction with other players. Not a problem for me personally, but it can be for others.

Otherwise I thought it was a good game.
Quickly and easy to learn, quick and fun to play.

​Anybody can learn and play Karuba. It's such a visually driven game that players should quickly comprehend what they need to do.

It's a game that's definitely going on my list.