Cartagena (or Les évadés de Cartagena) is a board game that represents the famous 1672 pirate-led jailbreak from the fortress of Cartagena, supposedly becoming popular in the coves of the Caribbean.

With its very simple concept, this game of strategy gives each player a group of six pirates and the objective is to have all six escape through the tortuous underground passage that connects the fortress to the port, where a sloop is waiting for them.

Gameplay

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Each player starts with six pirates in the Cartagena prison, and the first player to move all six pirates to the sloop is the winner.

The game board is made up of six (double-sided) sections, each of which has a different permutation of the same six pictures: daggers, pirate hats, pistols, bottles of rum, skulls, and skeleton keys. These six sections can be combined in any order, to make thousands of different games (although nowhere near as many as the 720⁶ combinations theoretically possible).

Each player is dealt six cards out of a set of 102: 17 cards for each of the six pictures. Pirates are moved forward by playing these cards; new cards can only be obtained by moving backward.

Each turn, a player makes three moves, which can be either forward or backward.

To move forward, the player selects a pirate. plays a card, and moves that pirate forward to the next unoccupied square with the same picture as the card. If there are no unoccupied spaces ahead, the pirate moves to the sloop.

The move backward, the player selects a pirate and moves it back to the closest square with one or two pirates. If that square has one pirate, the player draws one card; if it has two pirates, the player draws two. Pirates cannot be moved all the way back to Cartagena.

Variations

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The game can be played in two variants: Jamaica, in which the deck is hidden and players cannot see each others' cards, and Tortuga, in which the cards are visible. The game plays quite differently in the two versions.

Jamaica games tend to be fast-paced (30–45 minutes), and involve both skill and luck. Tortuga games involve much less luck; the game is simple enough that the winner is usually the player who can perform the deepest analysis.

General

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Cartagena is generally categorized as a race game. It is much shorter and simpler than Hare and Tortoise (often considered the exemplar of race games), and is usually played as a light time-killer rather than a deadly serious competition. However, it is much more complicated (and requires much more skill, even in the Jamaica variant) than children's race games like Snakes and Ladders.

The fact that each player has six pieces and three moves per turn makes the strategy somewhat different from most other race games.

External links

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• Rio Grande Games' Cartagena product page
• Cartagena review at SOS' Gameviews
• Cartagena online at BrettspielWelt.
• Cartagena PC implementation in Python

Board games