Guest article: ColoRAtto
Posted by Rob Herman at July 26th, 2007
Suggested and written up by reader Nevin; I have cleaned it up a little, but the ideas are his.
Synopsis: A hybrid of Coloretto and Ra, showcasing the fundamental idea of both: that different cards have different values to different players.
Setup: From a Ra set, remove all the gold, three floods, and one of each civilization tile. The suns are not used; the board is only used for the Ra track.
Play: As in Coloretto, there is one “row” of tiles for each player that can hold a maximum of three tiles. On your turn you may either pull a tile from the bag and add it to a row, or you may take one of the rows and be out of the round until all players have taken a row.
Gods only count for (2, as usual) points and cannot be used to take tiles as in Ra.
Disasters do not have their ordinary function and do not count against the “three tiles per row” limit. They count only after the third epoch, at which point each player scores -1 for having 1 disaster tile (of any kind), -3 for 2, -6 for 3, and so on.
If you pull a Ra tile, add it to the Ra track and draw another tile. If the Ra track fills up, as in Ra, the epoch ends immediately (players who haven’t taken a row yet are out of luck) and is scored exactly as in Ra. The game is over after the third epoch.
Thanks, Rob! Your cleaned up version is much better than my original rambling.
I haven’t actually tried this game yet, but I want to. Since I just played the real Coloretto for the first time since last year, though, I can see now that I didn’t account for an important aspect of it. I hadn’t remembered how much of that game was based on playing cards that your opponents won’t want on top of the ones that they will want. It’s surprisingly vicious. It’s vital that a given color may be helpful to one person’s collection and harmful to another’s.
Though tiles in ColoRAtto are going to be worth different amounts to different people, you can say for sure that a disaster tile will be bad for anyone, and any other tile will be good (or at least neutral) for everyone. With that, it might not feel right.
It’s still definitely worth a try, though.
I don’t think it’s so bad because given the fact that players will have almost exactly the same number of tiles, making every tile count is a big deal. Under the right circumstances tiles (Civs and Monuments in particular) can be worth 5 points each. So filling a row with an less-useful River or Pharaoh could be a big deal.
I suppose we have to playtest and see.
If nothing else, I like the idea of Coloretto with multiple scoring rounds.
If this variant doesn’t work out, I’d be interested in a simpler one that has 3 rounds of Coloretto-like scoring, but there are other cards you can collect that are used in a final scoring round.