Calçada

• Designer: Vangelis Bagiartakis, Konstantinos Karagiannis
• Publisher: Piatnik
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

There is a lot of activity on the Portuguese sidewalks. The first bars open and numerous people swarm out. Children scamper around happily, couples in love stroll through the alleys, while older passers-by relax on park benches in the shade following the hustle and bustle.

In Calçada, players take turns drafting pavement-tiles from the general display onto their player board via a mancala-inspired selection mechanism. Once someone completes a certain area, they get points based on the value of that area. This value then decreases. At the end, everyone gets extra points for connected objects or groups. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

To set the game up, place the scoreboard on the table and place one cube of each color on the top of the columns.  The gameboard is seeded with the remaining 15 cobblestone cubes in a clockwise pattern of 0,1,2,3,4,5 cubes in a space.  The Calçada tiles are separated into 5 piles (by back color), and then a market of three tiles is flipped up for each color. In addition to the background color, there are also five possible motifs that can be found on them (or a bonus icon).   Players get their personal board, all on the same side, and 2 bonus tiles.  The player board is split into 8 or 9 regions (all slightly colored differently to help you identify them).  Spaces within the regions have numbers from 1 to 5 in them.

On a turn, the active player goes thru two phases. First, the player chooses any one cobblestone on the game board, announces the color of the stone and the number of cobblestones currently in that space.  I.e. “Red 3”. The chosen cobblestone is then moved to the next clockwise space on the board.  If you have an unused bonus tile, you can discard it to move a single cobblestone one space clockwise before you make your announcement.  You can do this as many times as you have bonus tiles.

In the second phase, the player then chooses a Calçada tile matching the announced color from the display and that tile is then placed on the player board on a space which shows the same number as what was announced. (If the number of cobblestones announced is greater than 5, the tile can be placed anywhere).  Note that all the tiles within a region of the board must be the same color.  If the player took the last face up tile of a color, at that time, refresh the display with three new tiles.  You can also refresh the tiles of a color at any time by spending a bonus tile.

If a region is completely filled, it is immediately scored.  Multiply the number of tiles in the district by the multiplier currently shown on the scoreboard for that color.  Record the points scored on the track around the outside of the player board, and then move the scoreboard cube for that color down one space on its track.  If you move the cobblestone marker off the final space on the track, score two additional points, and for the rest of the game, no one can choose Calçada tiles of that color.

The game ends when the second Cobblestone color is moved off the scoring board. The current round is completed so that all players have the same number of turns. Now for each motif, you will score bonus points for your orthogonally connected areas (regardless of color/region). Each tile in an incomplete district scores 1 point, and you score 1 point per 2 bonus tiles left over.  

The player with the most points wins the game. There is no tiebreaker.

My thoughts on the game

So I’ve spent some time in Lisbon, and I both loved and hated the streets there.  Portuguese pavement, known in Portuguese as Calçada portuguesa or simply Calçada (or pedra portuguesa in Brazil), is a traditional-style pavement used for many pedestrian areas in Portugal. It consists of small pieces of stone arranged in a pattern or image, like a mosaic.  The pavement is distinctive and beautiful, but also difficult to keep your footing on, especially when literally everything in the city is straight uphill!

As well as being familiar with the theme, I’m also familiar with the prolific number of games of one of the designers, Vangelis Bagiartakis – whose games run the gamut of complexity from Kitchen Rush and Dice City to Among the Stars to Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory!   Calçada definitely comes in on the lighter side of the designer’s spectrum.  FWIW, I have played two games from the other half of the design team, Konstantinos Karagiannis – Dungeon & Dragons: Dungeon Scrawlers and Belladone Bluff.

I like the way that you have to try to massage the mancala-like board here to let you place the tile that you want in the space that you want.  While you’re trying to figure this out, you also are racing against other players to get the best multiplier for your areas and also trying to leverage the end game bonus for getting large contiguous areas of the same motif.  There is a surprising bit of depth to this one; I thought it would strictly be a family-level game, but there is certainly something more to it than that.

The rules themselves are dead simple.  Once you set up the game, one or two sample declarations and tile placements are probably all you need to get the game started.  I’ve literally taught the game in under five minutes.  That being said, there is a surprising amount of depth to some of the decisions within the game because of the multiple layers of goals you’re trying to achieve with each tile placement.

Thus far, the games seem to be a race early on to score small (2 or 3 tile) regions with the highest x3 multipliers, and then possibly getting a large area to at least score double.  I’d definitely keep an eye out on the colors that the other players are collecting as I did see one game swing heavily in favor of a player who was able to get a 5-tile region score at x3 because everyone else chose different colors to score at the start…

The game gives you some interesting decisions but the graphic design really makes it hard to play at times.  First, let me mention that the backgrounds of the different tiles are meant to be realistic (and I have in fact walked on many of those same patterns on my trips to Lisbon).  However, the downside is that it can be quite difficult to see the necessary game information as a result.  It bothered me more than some others, but it has been something that has been mentioned in every game I’ve played so far, so I know I’m not the only one.

The more pressing issue is the way the tiles fit on the player board.  The tiles are an exact fit for the spaces on the player board – and while this makes for a nice pattern, it makes it honestly impossible to see the lines/colors underneath that help you separate the different regions from each other.  Players are constantly lifting tiles to see what is underneath to remind them of which spaces are in which region.  If there was some way to make these divisions more apparent – whether thicker bolder lines which could be seen outside the tiles or perhaps rounded corners to the tiles to allow you to peek at the color of the board underneath – it would be ergonomically easier to play.

The last thing that would make the game easier is some sort of player aid for the end-game scoring – this could have have been printed on the player boards….  The value for large contiguous areas of the same motif can really swing the result of the game, but the only place to reference this is in the middle of the rulebook.  As people are trying to calculate their best play, they often had to ask for the rules to recall how much adding a tile of the same motif to their blob would result in.  

Those quibbles notwithstanding, Calcada is good choice for family game night / super filler slot with regular gamers.  It is quick, it offers the player some interesting choices while never getting overly complicated nor lengthy. The boards do look quite nice when the game is finished.  And, at least for me, it reminds me of fantastic trips to Portugal and transports me there for a bit.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral.
• Not for me…