Designers: Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro (Madeira, Nippon, Panamax), Paulo Soledade (Madeira, Nippon, Panamax)

Artist: Mariano Iannelli (Fairy Tale, Madeira, Nippon, Railroad Revolution, Reef Encounter, Signorie, Vasco de Gama, Vinhos, ZhanGuo)

Publisher: What’s Your Game? (Caylus, Fairy Tales, Madeira, Nippon, Railroad Revolution, Reef Encounter, Signorie, Vasco de Gama, Vinhos, ZhanGuo)

Genre/Mechanisms: area control, dice rolling, economic, worker placement

Funding Status: At the time of this posting, Madeira Collector’s Edition + Expansion is already fully-funded.  In fact, pledges currently total almost 8.5x the initial funding goal with 7 days left to go on the campaign.

Player Count: 2-4

Solo Mode: no

Complexity: heavy

Risk: medium-high

What It’s About:  Heavy worker placement game Madeira gets a new edition with six expansions and new premium components.

How It Works: The base game of Madeira is played over 5 rounds, with 5 different phases in each round: Round Setup, Character Actions, Building Actions, Maintenance, and The Crown’s Requests.

During Round Setup, players shuffle the 4 Character tiles & randomly place them face-up on the Buildings, roll the 3 Pirate Dice and place them on the City Watch, roll the 3 Guild Dice and place them on the top row of the Guild Board, and Choose a Guild in player order, taking the associated Guild Dice & Crown’s Requests and flipping the associated Guild Favor tiles. During Character Actions, players take turns placing a Die on a Character or passing their turn. Place a die on the Steward and the player moves up to 2 Workers to any Field without Workers; place a die on the Guild Master and the player may take a Guild Favor, discarding the requisite amount of Wood; place a die on the Commander and the player may move 2 of their ships to an empty slot, either on a Colony Landing Slot while discarding wine, or on a Market Route slot while discarding the requisite number and type of Goods; place a die on the Mayor and the player may relocate up to 2 of their own Workers and/or Neutral Citizens, collecting goods from all of the Cities containing at least 1 of their Workers; or place a die on the Character depicted on the currently empty building and take the associated action. When a player places a die on one of the 4 main Characters, instead of taking the associated action, they may instead execute a Harvest action, taking a Wood from every Field containing Wood where they have a Worker, or a Good from the Supply for every Worker in a Field where there is no Wood.

During the Building Action Phase, each Building with a number on the upper left corner is resolved, from lowest to highest. Players with at least 1 Action Marker on any given building either pays the cost of the Building to take the associated Action, or may instead receive Pirates (at the end of the game, players will lose points for the number of Pirates they have as compared to the other players, so taking Pirates is a punishment, and not beneficial). Buildings do various things, including giving Bread, paying out Prestige Points, allowing the player to move their Workers, allowing the player to flip their Guild Tokens, and moving Workers into the City Watch. During the Maintenance Phase, the player with the majority of Workers in the City Watch may move one to their Home and earn 4 Prestige Points; players receive Goods for each of their Workers in the Colony Lands; players discard 1 Wood for each their Ships on the board; and players discard 1 Bread for every Worker not automatically fed by the value of their Windmill. Those who don’t have the Bread to discard receive… more Pirates! And finally, during The Crown’s Requests, players receive Prestige Points for discarding Crown’s Requests tiles.

After the 5th round, the game ends. During End Game Scoring, players earn 1 Prestige Point for each Good and each Coin in their possession. Then the Pirate deficits are applied: -16 Prestige to the player with the most Pirates, -8 to the player with the second-most Pirate, and -4 and -2 to the players with the third- and fourth-most Pirates. The player with the most remaining Prestige Points wins the game.

Comparisons:  Although the first version came out only 6 years ago, the art is a bit dated by current standards, and the game has more of a feel of an older Euro to it The second edition, while upgrading the components and offering all of the mini-expansions in one package, still preserves that earlier art style. For reference, some other worker placements that released in 2013 include Brew Crafters, Caverna, Coal Baron, Francis Drake, Lewis & Clark, Ore: The Mining Game, Russian Railroads, and the original Viticulture. Keyflower, Lords of Waterdeep, The Manhattan Project, Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island, Snowdonia, Targi, Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar, and Yedo all released in 2012.

What Should I Pledge?:
$32 Expansion Set: four new modules, including New Beginning Expansion, King’s Demands Expansion, New Roles Expansion, and Capitanias Expansion, along with the Second Edition Extras.
$54 Base Game: a copy of the new, 2nd Edition of Madeira, along with the Second Edition Extras.
$54 Upgrade Pack: the Expansion Set, plus 139 Premium Wooden Resources, 50 Metal Coins, Game Trayz Storage System, and all unlocked stretch goals.
$98 Madeira Collector’s Edition: a copy of the Madeira Collector’s Edition Big Box, which includes everything in the Base Game & Upgrade Pack pledges.

Add-Ons:
None.

KS Exclusives:
The Collector’s Edition and Upgrade Pack are both KS-exclusive; the Expansion Set and Base Game will eventually be sold at retail. This means that the 138 Premium Resources, 50 Metal Coins, Game Trayz Storage System, and all of the unlocked stretch goals are KS-exclusives.

All-In Total: In the continental U.S. you’re looking at $98 for the Madeira Collector’s Edition and $14 in shipping, for a total of $112.

Madeira Collector’s Edition + Expansion completes its Kickstarter on Friday, October 11th and tentatively ships in March 2020.