Rats, Plague, and Quarantine Cabins
Exploring circular paths, estates, and overseers in Messina 1347
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The last two weeks we explored player agency. First we looked at two different player agency models that could help us talk about choice and control. In the second part, we looked at how games using the Carta SRD might increase player agency.
This week, I just want to talk about an interesting mechanism in a board game. Specifically a game I played recently: Messina 1347!
Messina 1347
You want rats, plague, and quarantine work houses?
Messina 1347 (Aparicio & Suchý, 2021) has got you covered:
Messina 1347 takes place during the introduction of the plague epidemic (a.k.a. the "black death") and the spreading of its infection through town. During this time period, merchant ships delivering luxury goods to Europe brought to these countries an unprecedented epidemic — and one of the first affected cities was Messina, Italy.
In the game, players are wealthy families who are able to leave town to avoid the plague. They can use their resources to save other citizens, by placing them in quarantine cabins until they are safe to come out. Of course, the citizens will be put to work generating resources like wood, fire, and coins.
These resources are used to take actions on the expanding hex map of Messina: burning plague tokens, rescuing more citizens, collecting resources, and advancing on the multiple tracks.
It’s a very depressing theme if you think about it, but mechanically the game has some interesting things going on.
Of the many mechanisms in the game, the estate management really stood out!
Estates and overseers
Outside of the main map of the city of Messina and the scoreboard, each player has a personal player board. The board has spots for your quarantined citizens, as well as a scroll board to track bonus scoring. The majority of the board is, however, your Estate.
Your estate is managed by 3 overseers — the 3 round tokens that start in the middle of the board. When you have an opportunity to advance an overseer, you may be able to gain benefits from some of the citizens in your estate.
The circular Estate area starts with your three round Overseer tokens in the center, one of each type: Craftsman, Nun, and Aristocrat. Depending where your post-quarantine citizens are located, you can gain some fairly powerful benefits such as resources and advancing on the score tracks.
The paths are circular, going out and back in just six moves. Once your Overseer returns to the center, they are done and will never move again. This becomes tricky because each path diverges at the second step, forcing the player to choose: left or right.
There’s also an opportunity to upgrade your Overseer token so it yields 2x the benefit when used.
After you learn the iconography for the game, the Estate board design is quite good. The paths are clearly marked, there is some color coding, and the benefits are fairly easy to decipher.
Choosing a path
With only six turns in the game, Messina 1347 is an extremely tight game. Every action matters, and it’s hard to advance on multiple tracks. So getting to move one of your Overseers is kind of a big deal.
Your Overseers move along their circular paths, with only one node that allows the choice to go left or right. Your citizens might be placed into the Estate earlier in the game, or toward the end. The Estate benefits only trigger, however, if the Overseer moves to a node with adjacent Citizens.
This leads to some hard choices:
Where do you place your Citizens to maximize your bonuses?
Which side of the circular path will you commit to?
Do you move one Overseer many times, or all Overseers a few times each?
As I mentioned in The cycle of aura, shadow, and flare I really enjoy cycling tokens and circular motions in board games. This one is no exception, though I do wish there were more opportunities to take the advancement action!
Conclusion
Some things to think about:
Consider cycling tokens: I think Messina 1347, Sakura Arms (BakaFire, 2022), Terra Mystica (Drögemüller & Ostertag, 2012), and Gaia Project (Drögemüller & Ostertag, 2017) are all good examples. It can be done with a printable player sheet and simple tokens, and can be a really satisfying experience.
Give players tough choices: We looked at choice, control, and influence, but we didn’t cover how to make choices really hard! One way to do that is to make all the options good. Choosing between really fun/good options can be difficult, especially if you know that choosing one path is closing access to another path.
Iconography is hard: I think Messina 1347 does an admirable job with icons, and includes a reference table on the back of the rulebook. The rat icons have both a picture (i.e. rat position) and color (i.e. background) to make it easy to tell them apart. This is probably a topic for another article!
— E.P. 💀
P.S. Those rat tokens look suspiciously like capybaras.
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I'm just going to say that capybaras are a rodent, therefore, they are rats. As for the rest, I find the game fascinating, so I'll try to get it. And I want to thank you for all your advice and mechanical analysis