Lisboa: A Masterpiece from Vital Lacerda
This review of Lisboa was featured on Episode 46 of The Five By. Check out the rest of the episode, which also features Mr. Jack, Lords of Waterdeep, Apocrypha and KLASK.
Lisboa is a game published by Eagle-Gryphon Games, designed by Vital Lacerda, with gorgeous artwork from Ian O’Toole. It plays 2-4 players, and even though the box says 60-120 minutes, my experience is it plays a little bit longer than that with maximum players.
Before we begin, Lisboa is by far one of the most complicated games I’ve ever had to teach, learn and play. In real life, rules explanation can take about 30 to 45 minutes. So if heavy games are not your bag, feel free to skip ahead five minutes. I totally will not be offended.
Lisboa is beautiful, crunchy and has a little bit of everything that a heavy gamer like myself enjoys. The game has area control, set collection, card drafting and tile placement. And probably most importantly, you get to decide your end-game scoring conditions.
The purplish-blue board game, whose color scheme is reminiscent of the Portuguese tiles the city is known for, is set in 1755, when Lisboa was struck by many natural disasters: an earthquake, fires and a tsunami, pretty much leveling the city. And now we’re all tasked with helping the city recover economically. We are taking turns to clear rubble, build ships and sell goods, get permits to construct public buildings, and set up shops so that the city can prosper. And we all want wigs. Lots and lots of wigs, which are VPs in this game.
The board is divided into two main parts: one side shows all the actions you can do on your turn, and the right side is filled with rubble and street locations for storefronts and public buildings.
What the game boils down to is its multi-use cards, and players picking from one of two actions with those cards from their hand of five cards. You can either tuck the cards into your portfolio, or play cards into the royal court to meet with the king, prime minister or master builder. These two main actions, either tuck or play, however, unlock a spiderweb of many, many other actions.
If you decide to tuck a card, you receive the reward or penalty for tucking that card. And then the card either gives influence for later or some permanent ability. You then can sell goods on an open ship or trade with the nobles, which will require goods. There are four goods in the game: gold, cloths, books and tools. Each noble wants a specific type of good, but all of them will take gold. If you trade the nobles, you can perform two different state actions if you meet the required good for that particular noble.
There are six different state actions you can choose from: recruiting officials (which you place on the board and will affect how other players meet with nobles), acquiring a plan (which you need to build public buildings), building a ship (which gives you influence and wigs when people sell goods to your boat), producing goods (if you have a storefront on the map), meeting the cardinal (which gives you Clergy tiles and benefits), and getting royal favors (which allow you to follow someone’s noble visit).
If you decide to not tuck your card, but instead play a card, you can visit a noble or gain the benefit from the treasury card. To visit a noble, you have to pay influence, and depending on who you visit, you can build a store (which is calculated by the rubble left at that intersection), take a decree card (criteria that will score you wigs at the end of the game), or open a public building (which requires to you already have a building permit of the same color in your possession and workers on the board).
As more stores are built in the city, it becomes less expensive to take that action because the rubble slowly get cleared. Rubble cubes are randomly placed at the start of the game so at the intersection of each storefront location, the price is calculated based on how many cubes are still there and which color, with beige being the most expensive and blue the cheapest. When you build, you remove one cube, and then pay the cost of the remaining cubes. And this is how you can collect sets of rubble on your player board, which will then unlock more spaces for cards to tuck and progress the game.
Also, when you satisfy the requirements and build a public building, you then gain the rubble the public building will sit on, and then if there is a storefront along that street where the public building was just placed, then the storefront scores VPs. In all, a storefront can score up to three times, if public buildings are placed on the north, east and west sides of the board.
So after you either tuck a card or play a card, you carry out the actions that correspond with the tucking or playing, and then you take a card from one of the face-up piles and your turn ends. The game is played out over two identical periods. The first period ends when someone collects two sets of rubble or three of the four piles of cards are depleted. The second period ends when someone collects four sets of rubble or three of the four piles of cards are depleted as well.
Lisboa manages to keep other players engaged even when it’s not their turn. As with other Lacerda games, there’s an option to follow another player’s main action. At the end of the game, you score any decrees you’ve collected, the various streets are scored according to who has the most storefronts on that street, and you a couple other items such as ships, influence and money.
The interconnectivity of all these actions is what I love most about Lisboa, which I believe is a masterpiece. Each action isn’t difficult per se, but there are a multitude of microsteps that need to first happen in order for you to do something large like, build a public building.
And that’s the super quick overview of Lisboa! This is Meeple Lady for the Five By Games. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as meeplelady, or on my website, boardgamemeeplelady.com. Thanks for listening. Bye!
