Portobello Market

This week my group played the game Portobello Market. The goal of the game is to achieve and maintain the highest score when the game ends.

In order to get score you get to place down market stands along the roads that goes between the eleven squares. Next to the road where you place down your markets there are numbers indicated how much score you will receive when the road has been completed.

Just having the road filled with market stands alone is not going to provide any score. In order to earn money from your market you will also need to place visitors down on the board. The visitors come in three different kinds. There is the ordinary visitor (gray), the noble visitor (pink) and the last square of the game will receive the ruler (black) providing the most scores to adjacent roads. The different kind of visitors acted as multipliers depending on what combination of them on each side of the road. With the different combination it’s possible to get anything from the regular 1x up to the 3x. The last visitor that is being placed, the ruler, is special and can provide either 3x or 4x multiplier, depending on if there is a noble or regular visitor in the other end of the road.

There’s also an alternative way for players to get score, it can be done by using the one of the two action markers that can also serve as a district marker. However before going into that I should first mention that the first move you get to do on your turn is selecting which of your action markers you would want to use. You start with a setup of 2,3 and 4 action markers, the 2 action marker gives you two action points 3 gives you three etc. With each of these action points you get to either place a market stand or a visitor. When selecting the action marker it becomes marked as used by being flipped, once all three have been flipped they are then on your next turn all flipped back and ready to be used again. The two and four action markers also have a secondary use as they can be placed out on the game board as district markers. The two district markers will then act as a multiplier for the district. Looking at the map a district will have three roads connected to it, and it will only give score to the player who played the district marker for his own market stands. However once you have placed one of your action markers as a district marker it will remain grounded on that district and you will not be able to use it again. instead you will receive a replacement marker from the neutral pile of action markers. These neutral markers ranges from 3 to 1 action points, placed in an order so the highest one available is always at the top. This being said you could upgrade your 2 action marker into a 3 action marker. But later on it could also turn out that the 4 action marker gets turned into a 1 action marker. It’s all depending on how the players chooses to play.

However just having the game like this would be to simple, if you got to place your market stands wherever you want. So this is where the next part of the mechanic comes in. The Bobby.

The Bobby gives the players ways to control the game, the bobby is placed on districts and may only move from one district to the next by crossing over roads. When crossing roads the player might need to pay for that action depending on the status of the road. If the player has the majority of the market places on the road the player may do so for free. If the road has no markets the player must pay one score for the movement action. If another player has the majority of the market places the acting player will need to pay one score to the player that maintains the majority. If the majority is split between two players, the fee for crossing will be one score to each of the players controlling the road.

So if it only cost you score as you move the bobby, why would you want to do it?
That is because the other properties of the bobby. Market stands may only be placed around the district where the bobby is located. And as theres no limit to how you may move the bobby during your turn, you can retreat with it into your territory and make others get no choice but to give you points for moving the bobby out. This strategy works better when only playing two players as the turns become longer the more players you are and it grows harder to gain a territory that you can keep majority on the roads to.

The action of moving the bobby does not count as using an action point, and may be done whenever and freely during the active players turns, as long as he follows the rules of paying when crossing over other roads

So what was so good about Portobello market? I would say that it was how easy the game was at first, but then the more you played it. The more it became obvious that there were so many different ways of playing it. As you get to select from either two, three or four action point to use at first. You can either get an early advantage or push at as many roads as you want. If you play your lower action points at first, later on when the other players only have their two action point move left, you could go forth with a dashing four action point move. When doing this on the third turn, you could also on your forth turn use the four action point again. When I tried playing this I realized it’s not only how you place the markers on the board, it’s a combination of how you use the action points with when you decide to use them. How you decide to place the markers on the board also has a big impact as well. I simply like that it’s so free formed and you get to make decisions on how you want to play your turn.

The game just simply evolves the more you experiment with different play styles!

And what was it that wasn’t that good about Portobello Market?

The way the game is changing depending on the number of players could have been better; the game plays so differently when played on two players compared to four. I’m not saying that it’s all a bad thing just that it could have been made more interesting. As the game plays now, when the game ends there are still multiple free places on roads available. I think that forcing the players to use all of the available roads would be more interesting.

While playing the game i got a feeling that being the starting player was at a disadvantage. As the game lets the round finish after the first player runs out of market stands. This can be used quite much by the last player of the turn as if he decides to use up all of his remaining market stands there is none left after him and the game would end instantaneous. But the first player of the turn would have to anticipate every move all the players could use. While I see this as a bad point, I cant figure out a simple mechanic to work around it, having a “new” turn go around would allow other players to get a higher total amount of turns and would be unfair as well.

I also think that changing the amount it costs to cross the roads should be raised. The one score you can get by having another player going over a road you have control over just ain’t gonna cut it when the move he makes after passing the road is gonna be two digits.

With the recommended age of eight years, I can clearly say that I agree with this recommendation. The actuall game mechanics are simple at first but advanced tactics can be worked through by playing the game more than once. The one thing that i think could be just a little bit tricky for players at the minimum age is the score calculation. As there are multipliers and multiple roads that could be in need of being calculated at the same time. In the end i would say that I agree with the recommendation age but I would also say that with that there should be an older person nearby that could help with the rules.

And to sum up the entire analysis of Portobello Market I would first say that I enjoyed playing this game. The strategic elements and the possibilities to try new strategies every time. Especially as you will always need to modify your strategy depending on what your opponents does. This creates the possibility of so many different outcomes of the game. The game is easy to learn and you wouldn’t even need the rule book if you had one player who knew the rules playing with you.

Once the game is over the game board can feel empty, as we didn’t try to play with changed rules to fill the board I can’t know for sure that it would make any good change. However I do like to belive that by forcing the players to use up all of the empty market stands on the boards, there would be multiple times where players would be forced to walk across roads where other players have a majority of the markets.