Kohle & Kolonie

Kohle & Kolonie does not let you play casually. It expects you to know what you are doing before you begin doing it. We gave the rulebook an honest fight, read the errata, hunted down clarifications, and somewhere along the way started playing our own version. It was probably not precisely the designer’s version.

In practice, the game’s core reached us through a fog of exceptions, cross-references and FAQs. I cannot honestly describe our turn sequence as the official one, because the rules had us questioning every step. The rulebook earns a tired mark, with an asterisk the size of a card.

What did come through was the pressure of a very tight, very heavy euro: decisions that do not welcome casual handling, and a table that keeps stopping to read before moving on. Our main interaction was a joint wrestle with the rules text, everybody trying to establish who was right. Not the most elegant form of conflict, but it has teeth.

And yet, beneath the tangle, we liked it a great deal. There is enough weight and constraint here to place it among the stronger games of its kind; it simply needs a cleaner, settled set of rules to show itself without an interpreter. Kohle & Kolonie is a very good heavy euro; it should not first require a degree in deciphering.