Olive oil might feel to most people like something typically Italian, even Sicilian. Extra virgin olive oil from Italy is precious and is seen as a status symbol to serve to your guests, but the world has several regions with a beautiful olive oil industry. In warm Portugal, farmers cultivate the finest olives and use them to make smooth olive oil. In Oliva, players step into the shoes of these farmers: they grow olives, press oil, and sell it at the market, while competing with their opponents and responding to the olive oil trade in other countries. If you don’t press the olives, you’ll never get oil.
Oliva is unique and difficult to describe. If I had to explain Oliva simply to someone already familiar with board games, I would describe it as a deckbuilder with a touch of bluffing. As a joke, we already called it a ‘bluffbuilder’ at the games table. Even that description is too simplistic, because calling Oliva a deckbuilder actually does this unique little game an injustice.
Let’s start with the theme. In Oliva, players take on the role of Portuguese olive farmers. Each player represents an olive region in Portugal, and every player starts the game with a small production capacity for growing olives, pressing them, and acquiring new elements through trade. All player actions, and thus their ways of growing and trading olives, are the cards in their deck. Players improve their well-oiled machine by adding new cards to their deck.
With their actions, players can collect black cubes or convert them to green cubes (growing, picking, and pressing olives). With olive oil cards, they can trade on three markets to buy new cards, and with money cards, they can trade on the special action market and improve their production processes. This all sounds complex, but it is a simple mechanism of playing cards for the corresponding actions, with a remarkable amount of thematic depth.
At the start of the game, each player already has two action cards face up on the tableau. At the beginning of a round, players draw five cards from their deck and select two cards to play face down on their tableau. Players then take turns revealing their cards and performing the action on their card, multiplied by the same symbols on cards already played and visible with both the active player and the other players. Good planning and estimating what other players will do is therefore essential. Here, tactical bluffing still plays a major role, because you don’t want to help the other players too much, but you do hope that they play certain cards that benefit you.
Each round, every player performs two quick actions, but with the right cards they can make beautiful combinations. Some actions also allow players to collect new cards for their deck, introducing new symbols into the game.
Some acquired cards also contain points or bonuses for the end of the game. Players can also invest in countries by acquiring the relevant cards or discarding them into a sort of olives commodity stock market. Players score points based on these countries in their deck, multiplied by those on the stock market.
Oliva is also beautifully designed and that, together with the unique and intriguing game mechanism, makes it a juicy little game with a big footprint.
