Portals

• Designer: Maxim Istomin
• Publisher: CrowD Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 20 min/player
• Played with copy provided by publisher

The great wizard Dominick Dey discovered a way to travel between different worlds using elemental magic, and spent centuries bringing back amazing artifacts, strange fruits, and exotic creatures. But one day he did not return home, and his fate remains unknown. In this abstract game, you are travelers between worlds. Your task is to follow the path of the famous wizard, collecting magic keys and using them to open portals to other worlds. Only a mage whose mastery rivals Dominick Dey’s will find him first and win the game! During the game, players draft fabulous Elemental stones to complete various shapes on Key cards. By activating completed Key cards, players fill Elemental boards with stones and gain Victory Points for matching colors and adjacency.

To setup the game, players sit at the table. An Elemental board and a Circle of Elements is placed in between each pair of players.  The Elemental stones are placed in the bag – 5 of each color per player.  The three decks of Key cards are shuffled separately, and a display of 2 cards from each is dealt out. Each player takes their 6 markers and places three of each next to each of the 2 Circle of Elements closest to them.  6 random stones are drawn from the bag and placed on each Circle.

The game is played over 4 rounds, 3 phases in each: Collect Key Cards and Stones, Activate Key cards, Prepare for the next Round

Collect Key Cards and Stones – on your turn, you get 2 actions. First you can take a Key card, choosing one of the 6 face up cards on the board. If you already have 4 in front of you, you cannot take one. If you have at least one Key card that has an unoccupied highlighted square on it, you can choose to pass on taking one.  Then you must take a stone from either Elemental Circle near you and place it on an unoccupied highlighted square on one of your key cards.  Then place one of your markers on that circle.  The next player then takes their turn, taking the same two actions. Continue this until all players have done this 6 times and 6 stones have been placed per player onto their respective Key cards.

Activate Key Cards – This phase is not done in clockwise order, but rather in ascending numerical order of the charged Key cards, that is those cards with all the highlighted spaces covered with stones.  When it is your card’s turn to go, you must transpose the stones from your card to one of the Elemental boards.  The order/arrangement of the stones must not change, but you are allowed to rotate your Key card.  Stones that are transposed to empty spaces are placed on the Elemental board; if there is already a stone in a space, your stone is returned to the bag.  The entire pattern of your stones must fit on the Elemental board.  Then calculate your score.  First, you score 1/2/4/6 points for having 1/2/3/4 stones transferred to squares matching the color of the stones.  Then look at each of the stones you just placed, and score 1 point per previously placed stone of matching color that is adjacent either orthogonally or diagonally.  Collect score tokens matching your total points scored and then discard your used Key card.  Continue this until all charged Key cards are used.

Prepare for the next round – all uncharged Key cards remain in front of players and stones are not moved on them. Each player takes back their markers and places three next to each Circle adjacent to them. 6 Stones are drawn from the bag and placed on each Circle. Play another round.

After the end of the fourth round, players count their tokens and the player with the most points wins. There is no tiebreaker.

Once you have mastered the basic game there are two additional modules that can be added to the game.  The Spellboard can be added; there are four special actions here which are triggered when a player puts their drawn stone on to the spellboard as opposed to their key card.  The Secret Signs module gives each player a Secret Sign card which is a pattern of stones; players will score 4 points if they can show a matching pattern on either of the two Boards near them; otherwise they lose 2 points.

My thoughts on the game

Portals appears to be an abstract pattern matching game though it’s not really about matching.  It was hard for my brain to remember that the game doesn’t actually require you to match the colors of the gems to the board spaces – though you will of course score better if you do so…  The game ends up being more about timing and (hopeful) clever placement.

At the start of the game, players seem to focus more on matching the colors of the gems to the spaces; and this is easier to do as the board is not yet filled with gems!  In any event, as there aren’t many gems on the board, it’s hard to score points for color adjacencies.  By the third round though, the tables are turned, and it becomes much harder to find completely empty patterns on the board; so you have to make the best of things – and as there are more gems to be adjacent to, it’s easier to score points for adjacencies.

Timing can be an important thing to watch – this is determined by the numbers on the cards. There are times when it is best to go first in a round; you’ll know exactly what spaces on the board will be available for you.  However, due to the adjacency scoring, there are also times when you’d rather go later in the round – because there might be more things that you can place your gems next to.  Invariably, if you are later in turn order to place gems, your initial spot might be taken by someone else, but that’s the gamble you have to take!

Of course, you have to take into account that each player has two different boards to play on (and two different stone circles to take gems from).  This complicates things even further when you’re trying to check out the options.   Again, don’t forget that the stones don’t have to match the board spaces, as I’ve found that there are times when I’ve spent far too much time trying to match an opponent’s card/gems to the board spaces – and it turns out they were playing for adjacencies instead!

If you have good mental spatial relationships, you might be able to foresee where your opponents will play their patterns, and as such, you can plan to thwart them by taking their spot (assuming you go earlier) or try to leverage their placement for better scoring for yourself (if you go later).  I don’t really have that ability, so I find that I end up taking a bit of time each turn as I have to examine my options, physically rotating my card around to see how it will fit on the board.  For me, each turn is a little exercise in min-maxing my score on the current turn without much ability to plan ahead for the future.

This seems to be the case for most of the people that I have played it with, and as a result, the game does end up plodding along by Round 3.  20 minutes per player seems like a pretty optimistic number based on the people that I play with and our history with the game.  The puzzle of getting the gems in the right place is interesting enough, but not enough to support the 60+ minutes that it takes to play the game.  At least there is a solo mode, and at this point, that looks to be the main way that this will hit the table around here as there is no downtime when you’re the only one puzzling over the gems and the board.  I’ve been able to leave it set up on my desk, taking turns as I have time.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers:

Mitchell T: The best abstract games reflect elegance, clarity, and interactivity. The depth of play comes from the beauty of that elegance. The lesser games promise that elegance, but add one or two rules (or steps) too many, thus inhibiting clarity, making it too difficult to look more than one move ahead, and thus caring less about your opponents moves because you are so deeply wound up in figuring out what to do for yourself. Portals probably contains the seed of an interesting game, but lacks sustained interest for all the reasons Dale mentions. And in all fairness, if you enjoy these types of spatial puzzles you can probably gain enough experience that you can see several moves ahead, but I’m not sure this game would ever become sufficiently interactive. 

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor