Pampero

After spending quite some time gathering dust on the other collector in our group’s shelf, it was time to tear open Pampero’s shrink wrap and serve it warm. It is a delightfully lavish box—and certainly not a model of sustainable production—full of meeples, counters, and every kind of little thingamajig. In bags and punchboards, the first impression is mildly intimidating, but O’Toole knows how to arrange cardboard: once the game is spread across the table and you have gone through the rules, everything finds its place and makes sense. It is one of those games that looks like a monster before setup, yet ends up having a wonderful table presence.

At its core, Pampero is a purely economic game with no luck involved. We begin with limited capital and try to expand into the lucrative world of renewable energy, chiefly by building wind turbines and distribution networks, while solar panels serve as a respectable alternative. The central card mechanism is the key to reading the game; once you understand it, the flow becomes quite streamlined and the theme connects beautifully to what you are doing.

Interaction mainly comes through the map, the infrastructure, and its economy. The rewards on the map are fixed from game to game, which may initially feel strange to veterans of the genre, but the variety of scoring tiles meaningfully changes priorities and justifies those specific starting balances. There is also a semi-cooperative element: I can use another player’s infrastructure by paying them. This is interesting, but it needs a group that plays seriously, because players who hand out favours can completely spoil a game’s balance.

Across our two plays, I clearly saw two different faces of the game. The introductory one, with its generous starting scoring tiles, did not win me over especially: it had heavy snowballing and virtually no catch-up. With the long time track and the proper random scoring tiles, though, the game showed its worth. I would place the result close to Smartphone, although there are fewer opportunities here for counterplay or for slowing down someone who has already pulled ahead. Even so, Pampero is a worthy piece: big, satisfying, and very pleasing to see spread out in front of you. Now we only need to find another four-day break for Rock Hard and the latest Nemesis—which probably means defeating the rest of fate’s evils first.