Pampero

Pampero is the sort of lavish box that seems, before organisation, to have swallowed a shop’s supply of meeples, counters, and markers. Ian O’Toole does the necessary magic again: what looks alarming in bags and punchboards becomes legible information once it reaches the table. It is not exactly a monument to sustainable production, but it is an object with considerable presence.

This is a pure economic game with no luck, asking players to turn modest starting capital into energy infrastructure: wind turbines, distribution networks, and solar power as a perfectly respectable alternative route. The card mechanism is the central piece of the puzzle; understand it and the game moves with surprising economy, although a newcomer may spend the opening stretch asking what, precisely, is happening. There is Concordia’s hand wearing different overalls, with some of Rococo and Glen More’s economic construction in the cut.

Map rewards are fixed between games, which is initially disconcerting for veterans accustomed to a variable setup. The interesting decision is how to build around them, because the scoring tiles materially change your priorities and provide the real replay value. Players may also use one another’s infrastructure for payment, a semi-co-operative feature that creates useful economic links but opens the door to kingmaking; hand out those payments carelessly and the game can be bent badly out of shape.

The introductory game, with its generous starting scoring tiles, produced excessive snowballing and almost no route back. With the long time track and properly random scoring tiles, Pampero made its case. I would place the result close to Smartphone, though it offers fewer meaningful counterplays once someone has established a lead. In the right configuration, it is a worthwhile, carefully engineered piece of work.