Kontor

From:Gold Sieber Cost: $20 Players: 2-4 Playing Time: 30 minutes Type of game: Card Skill level: Complexity: Reviewed by: Ben Baldanza, Issue 6.1 (21), Summer 1999

Kontor is a 1999 Spiel des Jahres nominee and is produced to the high quality standard expected from Goldsieber. It is a tile-laying game, with square cards (ala Settlers of Catan Card Game) used as the tiles to create warehouses and harbors in the channels of Amsterdam. In addition to two decks of dock cards (one for each player or team), you get a common deck of water cards, nicely embossed wooden coins, a wooden ship, and of course colored wooden cubes to represent each of the warehouse commodities of tea, spice, and wine. All of this comes in a box large enough to hold 10 copies of the game.

The basic game begins with a “cross” of water cards in the center of the table. Each player makes their hand from three random cards of their “dock card” deck and two cards from the common water card deck. Each card has a priority number that determines its play sequence, and some cards have a coin symbol that, when played, require the opposing player or team to pay a tax. The dock cards contain 0-3 commodities, and it is these commodities that determine who controls the harbors once they are completed.

In a two-player game, each player plays a card face down and they are revealed simultaneously. They are played in priority number order, and can be placed adjacent to any already played card but not outside the virtual grid agreed upon at the start (6 x 6 for the basic game). Your goal is to create a warehouse in a harbor spot by placing a dock card with commodities on it. You put the relevant cubes on this card, and this becomes the warehouse for any and all commodities later placed by you in that same harbor. Eventually, the harbor will be closed (completely surrounded by water or border), and at this point the warehouses of each player is compared to determine control. Generally the person with more commodities wins. And a simple “rock, paper, scissors” hierarchy breaks ties. When the grid is complete, whoever controls the most harbors wins.

Within this simple construct, different cards add variety and strategic play. If you play a card with a coin, your opponent must pay one of his coins to the bank. If you play a water card, though, you take a coin to replenish your supply. Water cards are often as strategic as dock cards, so in the basic game money is rarely a problem. If you are caught penniless, though, and your opponent can continue to play cards requiring a tax, you will be shut out of play for a while. A crane card blocks the orthogonally-adjacent spaces for your color dock cards, but doesn’t stop your opponent from playing water cards there. There is no minimum or maximum size for a harbor in the basic game, meaning that you can gain a victory point by blocking in a single one of your dock cards.

The ship is added to create more interest, and when you play a card with a ship symbol you are allowed to move the ship (which starts neutrally in the center) to any other water card. If it docks next to a previously-placed card with a ship symbol, that card can be removed if it not in an already-completed harbor. Warehouse stocks are adjusted when this happens, making this a useful device for changing the balance of power if your opponent leaves himself exposed. Additionally, two special card types, floods and bridges, can be used to wipe out dock cards or connect areas if included in the decks.

Having only three dock cards in your hand at any point is a limiting selection, as often adding a card to a harbor won’t help your relative position much due to the commodity-ranking hierarchy. The water cards are ranked higher, meaning that they will usually be played ahead of the docks. In the ship variations, you must be careful about leaving ship cards exposed next to open water, and in all games the money can become a problem if it’s ignored. The card numbering system is wide, so you often are not sure if the card you played will have you going first or second, and logically the cards with multiple commodities have lower numbers.

During the game there are decisions to be made about whether to fight for a certain harbor or just start a new one. The no size limit rule of the basic game is silly, since it is often easy to create multiple one-card harbors and rack up points. This is especially true in some of the published variations, and therefore we’ve adopted a house rule requiring that a harbor must consist of at least two dock cards to be valid.

A strength of Kontor is that many other starting options and layouts can be used to modify the basic game. By changing the size or shape of the grid, the starting water card configuration, the amount of money to start with, or the victory point conditions (such as “only the five largest harbors scored” or “only harbors two cards away from the center can be scored”), it is possible to create many variations that require subtle differences in play. The rules contain a number of these, and it’s not hard to design others quickly. More are available at the author’s web site, http://hello.to/kontor.

Kontor is a nice game to look at, and its play is logical and consistent. But there is no way to get around the fact that it is just boring. There are rarely tension-filled moments, and often the choice of card to play from your hand is very obvious. I really want to believe that this is a better game, because the theme makes sense and the card variety makes you think there is more meat in the box. After repeated play in multiple configurations, though, the same thing keeps coming through: dull, dull, dull. The four-player game is a simple partnership version of the two-player game, and I see no reason to ever play Kontor with any more than two. There are hundreds of better four-player games to play and dozens of better partnership games. Spiel des Jahres? A most puzzling pick if you base it on play, and not looks.