Sunda To Sahul

Sunda To Sahul is a game published in Australia around 2002. I played it once at a friend's house when I came here on a visit, and was quite taken with it, but couldn't get hold of it in the UK. And it's been long out of print; even the publisher's website is long gone.

Last week I found a pristine copy in a charity shop for $4.

It's a tile-laying game loosely based around the stone-age colonisation of the islands along the Indonesian archipelago to New Guinea and Australia. What makes it a bit different is that the tiles are wooden jigsaw pieces, so unlike hexes or squares there are limited ways that some can connect with others.

Each turn you lay two pieces. If you create a node - a place where a complete set of land pieces connect at a point - you get to place a tribe token. You can place this on the node, or on an existing token or stack of tokens on the same island.

Here's the early stages of a game. The masks and shells are competing for the island. The masks have claimed water rights on a small lake. The axes have a small presence, but have also claimed territory on a second island forming to the top of the picture.

There is a combat mechanism, where a stack can enter into conflict with another stack. The resolution is a simple highest die roll comparison, with the outnumbering side getting to roll more dice and picking the best. The loser gets a token in their stack replaced by one of winner's. Stacks can have tokens of more than one player in them.

At the end of the game - when one player runs out of tokens - you score for each token you have on the board. Those in stacks are worth more than singletons, and anything on a completed island is worth double. There are bonus points for controlling lakes and resource tokens as well.

Anyway, Catherine (axes), Maya (shells) and I (masks) played a game yesterday afternoon. I think we  picked up some of the strategies fairly quickly. Maya and I competed for a large island which, halfway through the game we realised couldn't be completed. Catherine opted out and made her own island instead, although we muscled in on it obviously.

Catherine completed her more modest island, so anything on it was now worth double points. 

The finished game. Having realised that the big island would never be completed, Maya and I branched out onto smaller ones. Because of the way nodes work, you can't have as many tokens on the islands (there can never be more than one token per node), but it's easier to get the completion bonus.

Anyway, Maya came a distant third. I thought I had a clear victory, but in fact Catherine ran me fairly close. She had fewer tokens on the board, but her decently-sized complete island meant that some of her stacks scored big points. So I won, but not by a huge margin.

It was a fairly entertaining game, a gorgeous to look at and use. Its biggest flaw is, unfortunately, the tile-laying. All pieces are placed face-up and available to all players, so a turn can take a long time, as a player searches for the perfect tile, or simply one that will fit in the space they want to expand into. Early on, finding tiles isn't too bad, but by halfway a lot of the useful ones are gone. If you're OK at rotating shapes in your head, you can scan the pieces quite quickly, but it's not everyone's forte. Posts on BGG suggest that people have tried simply drawing tiles, or limiting each turn's selection, but this apparently makes nodes much harder to complete, so slows the game down because the players don't get to place tokens as often. 

So it's a decent game at heart, but with a flaw in the way tiles are selected that makes it less attractive to play than, say Carcassonne. Worth $4 though.

52 Games - Game 38