This review was previously only published on the Dice Daniel Instagram page.
A tall tale exists detailing that Marco Polo would have brought pasta from China to Italy. As a child I was very grateful to him for giving us pasta, but nothing could be further from the truth. It was a marketing trick to sell more pasta in the US… In the game Marco Polo you follow in the footsteps of the explorer and trade on the silk route (no pasta unfortunately). Recently Marco Polo II was released: a game where discovering and trading goes into second gear.
However, the game is not an expansion and you don’t need to have played Marco Polo to play part II. You might want to consider Marco Polo II as a variation on the earlier game. The gameplay is similar, but with sufficient changes. In Marco Polo II, players use their rolled dice to perform different actions. With their dice they can get goods, money or camels (which they then have to pay to perform other actions). Players can also travel, join guilds and conclude trade contracts. They do this to collect even more goods and points.
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You only have a limited number of actions you can perform each round and sometimes you are tied to the result of your dice throw. So you have to think carefully to plan the best route of your action. The player with the most points after 5 rounds wins the game.
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Trading as a theme in games does not appeal to me personally but the fine gameplay has surprised me very much. Marco Polo II reminds me of the boom/rise of the modern eurogame genre with games like El Grande. Games with a simple set-up, but with an extreme amount of difficult choices and therefore very complex. If you want to win Marco Polo II, you have to plan well. I don’t have to thank Marco for the spaghetti, but I do want to thank him for this game.
