The bidding starts with a single offer from G 55, I 20 goes to a fellow at your party’s table. Then in a fury of sight and sound the next four offers rattle off G51, O65, N34, N38. The pressure rises as the competition rockets to the skies like a G6. All I need is a B7, a G46, and a renewed U.S. passport to win.
Then from across the great hall someone shouts
“Bingo Bango Bongo, I’m going to the Congo!” as they have successfully outbid all the other guests and won the all expenses paid trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Your body collapses as you taste defeat and wonder how you can find the will to go on. Upon summoning the strength to raise your head from its now permanently downcast position you find that you were merely playing low stakes Bingo with a group of senior citizens. Why were they babbling on about the Congo? They “can-go” out for dinner next week?
Before I Needlessly Go On, I want to apologize for any damage caused by my previous puns or the lies I told in setting up this review, they weren’t Gr8. Much like the game of bingo itself my lies were random, impersonal, and numeric based. Because I’m Not Good, Obviously. But what if a game delivered on the premise presented at the prelude of Bingo. Individual player boards, communal competition, large sums of treasure and glory for the winner. Well then bingo, bango, bongo let’s go to the village of Karuba, which is located in the Congo!
Four explorers wash ashore the island’s sandy beaches, welcomed to the jungle. Nothing but the acrylic paint on their backs and a dream of one day finding the long lost temple of their matching acrylic color. Each adventurer starts on a the southwest edge of the island with their matching temple placed on the northeast end a minimum of 3 long spaces away. And then the game is afoot. One player draws a tile from a pile and everyone takes a while to file and style their own board through error and trial. Had a few more, But I Never Go Overboard. Turn by turn, and grid by grid, players begin cutting their way through forest choosing between hedging the bushes or hedging their bets.
You see the trick in Karuba is that with each tile drawn there are only two options. Play the tile to your board and flesh out your path to a temple, or discard it to gain movement. Further complicating matters is the distraction of gold and diamond trinkets sprinkled along the way. Each draws your attention and demands your proximity to it. If you choose to pick up a treasure you must end your turn there, wasting any extra movement you may have accrued from discarding a tile. But beware, these trails are narrow and filled with terrors, mainly the terror of knowing that no one can pass each other while en route to a temple. This is where the joy of random draws comes into full view. Because only one particular draw will guide your last, lone meeple to the shimmering temple it has always dreamed of. And there is no way. That. Just. Happened! (This exact scenario occurred in only my second play-through of the game at which point all players were cheering for the betterment of a single individual. Which I would not have believed was possible if some idiot on the internet told me about a game of solitary tile placement on a coordinated grid.)
What can i say, Better Interaction Never Gets Old. This tension between forging your own path and peeking at other’s decisions was where this game really shown through the dense foliage of an otherwise uninspired theme. It really lent itself to cut scenes of Indiana Jones racing against his colleagues to procure ancient relics before one another. Insufferable nostalgia aside the game did suffer a bit from some over examining by players, occasionally leading to analysis paralysis. Also the game tends to favor concise paths and players with an affinity for spatial mapping. So much so that after several games of a single player rushing the pace and crushing everyone’s face there was no love lost over moving on to another game. These gripes though are the entirety of my negative feelings towards the game. Yes, the theming is unoriginal...but it’s also rather accessible. And some people will be better at it from the get go...so get gud m8! Neither of these negatives should detract from your view of the game nor should they distract you from this simple premise. Buy It Now, Go On.
Oh and by the way those were 5 phrases whose initials spell out BINGO, and not just the most egregious uses of caps since your grandma got a facebook account and wanted to post some inspirational quote on your profile page instead of just sending it in a message like all the cool kids who know how to social media real good.
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