Sunday 14 January 2018

BOARD GAME REVIEW: SPECTACULUM (2012)

Spectaculum is a shareholding game from Reiner Knizia. In it, you are controlling the paths that 4 travelling shows are traversing through the kingdom in the hopes of buying low/selling high. At the end of the game, the most money is the winner.

The theme of the game is intriguing. You effectively have 4 gag-circus' running around the centre of the board. This is achieved by drawing there tokens from the bag and placing them on a board next to similar tokens. When they reach cities, there prices will go up or down (or perhaps money will be collected or payed out). In effect, however, the theme here doesn't really matter.

What does matter is that you buy or sell a share twice on your turn. The main goal here is to buy when they are low and sell when they are high. The game ends when the centre town has been taken and all but one city is gone.

This game feels average. The components are okay but have no pop. The cards look nice but every circus is the same and they don't give you anything special. It would have been cool to have a special power based on which performer you get or something. The game just lacks a certain zing to it which games that I'm not a fan of have. The one plus side is that it is pretty easy to teach and play, but it is unlikely to provide any sort of gaming sustenance.

2 out of 5 non-spectacular waffles. 

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