Ostia: First Impressions — Cult Cardboard

The new BGG hotness has strong winds behind its sails

One of my intentions this year is to seek out board games outside of the traditional origins (mostly) of Europe and North America. A way to experience what the hobby means to publishers and designers with different cultural backgrounds from my own. As such, a chance perusal of BGG’s (boardgamegeek.com for the novice among us) hotness showcased a game atop of the rankings that caught my attention, not only for its alluring blue hued box cover, but also because both publisher and designer hail from the land of Japan. Serendipity, folks. Serendipity.

What’s even more amusing, even though trying to gain a copy of Ostia is a bit of a hassle to get a hold of (currently, the way to get new copies is to back another game by the same designer and publisher duo as an add-on) someone at my gaming group obtained an original copy and was eagerly wanting to try it out. What’s a fella to do? You make sure you’re at that table, that’s what.

So fresh off a 4-player game of Ostia, here are my first impressions of this Japanese designed Euro.

Set Sail

I typically don’t speak much of components unless there is something magnificently wrong with them or are a notch above the usual. Here, I must speak of the quality because Ostia has some really good bits and pieces, plus a carefully refined art direction that ostracizes loud colors for cooler, subdued hues. The color palette here is limited, too. It’s about exclusion more than adding unnecessary flourishes of paint when a few shades of blue and beige will do. What it does, then, is allow the wooden ships and tokens that float about the board to pop. Boats, the wooden resource pieces, and cardboard trinkets never get lost on the main board. The one nitpick—and it is just a nitpick—is that I would have liked the right-side tracks to slim down a bit to let the main pathways the boats traverse breathe a bit, or to reduce the overall size of the main board. The game is a bit of a table hog when you include the player boards and cards that straddle the outside edges, at least for four players.

Speaking of player boards, the personal boards are dual layered and have notches for building tokens and a recessed area for your corbita and ponta ships. Folks, once you experience dual layered boards, it’s hard to go back to plain, flat sheets. Truly spoiled here. The box also holds a plastic insert for all the components, although I’m not sure if it will allow for expansions to fit.

Set up was not convoluted, but not limber either. It will take a few minutes to arrange for a four-player game, but fewer people will reduce the set-up time tax.

Alright, so the fit and finish is top notch here, what of the gameplay itself?

Fleet of foot

Five Tribes is a nifty game. Its main draw is its mancala-styled mechanism of picking up different colored meeples and spreading them amongst the spaces as you head to your destination. It’s a little brain burny (at times AP inducing) and satisfying when pulling off a move you foresaw a turn or two ago. So too in Ostia, but while Five Tribes asks you to concern yourself with the action coming at the end of the line, designer Totsuca Chuo compels you to also consider what happens at the beginning as well, before even a single wooden ship is picked up at all.

A brief explanation is in order.

Ostia, at its core, is a resource management game. There are other appendages like route building and set collection, but the main input/output steering the ship here is gaining resources to trade and build stuff with them. How you get those resources is dependent on planning on your Selection and Production phases. On your turn, you select one of the six sections on your player board and count how many ships there are in that section which gives you an equal number of resources of that resource type. Then, using the mancala mechanic, you gather all the ships in that section and distribute one ship per zone you pass until you reach the last section with your last ship. Once there, you perform the action attached to that zone. It doesn’t sound like much, but boy, the implications can spiral in both positive and negative ways. Preplanning or the lack thereof can be the difference between successful or indifferent turns.

This little addition is what makes Ostia clever, what gives these waters its currents to push your little engine forward as the game progresses, but also, without some foresight it can leave you dragging your anchor at the bottom of the seabed, keeping you pinned in the ocean. And foresight you’ll need because understanding the resources you produce now, may not be necessarily used until one or two turns in the future is key to getting ahead of everyone else as they synchronize their movements to maximize turns.

And folks, this kept me invested in Ostia.

This little mini game is enthralling. It gets your brain moving and squeezing every bit of computing power you can muster. Sure, like I said before, there are other things going on within the main board—moving ships along, buying order cards, building boats and structures and set collecting—standard Euro trappings, but all of that could be forgiven and even celebrated because, at least at first glance, Ostia provides a satisfying whirlpool of options connecting it together.

If on future plays (I hope to get at least one 3-player game) the thrill is still there, I can definitely see this being a ‘to buy’ game when it comes out. That is, if there is a North American publisher willing to bring it here (there are rumblings of a publisher picking up the rights). From my solid first play, I believe Ostia is a title worth keeping an eye on, and one I can’t wait to review.