skinnerclan.org

I’ve played Santiago three times thus far.

Rules

The game is fairly simple mechanically: you have an empty tile-based board, and you bid for tiles which you must place. You have control markers on the tiles, but these markers will go away unless the tiles are adjacent to a stick, which may be placed in between the tiles on the board. The person who bid the least for choice of tile gets to decide where the stick is placed each round (and the stick must be placed). The other players offer up victory points as bribes to the person who bid the least so that their tiles don’t lose control markers at the end of the round. After 11 (or 9 in a 5 player game) rounds, the game ends and you score up.

Each tile has two attributes: the number of control markers it’s owner gets to put on it when it is placed, and the color (ie “crop”). Both of these attributes are important.

End game scoring is as follows: each orthogonally contiguous area is scored in turn. A player receives a number of victory points equal to the number of tiles in that area multiplied by the number of control markers they have in total in that area. So if I have 7 markers on an area that has 9 tiles, I get 64 victory points. If I have 4 control markers on an area that is 3 tiles large, I get 12.