Noli

If Noli‘s box suggests a gentle experience of medieval trade and influence, be warned: this game can be both brutal, and manic. Frequently at the same time.

The goal is to be the player with the highest tower at the end of the game, which occurs either when someone stacks the sixth block on their tower, or someone reaches the end of the influence track. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, because Noli is – mostly – a bidding game, so we should talk about bidding.

Everyone begins with some cash and in each round of the game we’ll all bid – secretly, behind our screens – on four different things, which are then revealed and resolved from left to right. The first is the right to push your piece up the influence track, which is a tie-breaker for both bidding (important!) and potentially, the winner of the game later if there’s more than one tallest-tower. Then we resolve the highest bid for oarsman and boats – relevant for the coming boat race, and to be explained below – before finally the highest bidder on towers gets to add another block to their tower. Then… after everyone loses the money they bid, the race begins!

Each round in Noli has a boat race, which consists of all players rolling all their dice at the same time until they have each die with an oarsman symbol face-up. This part of the game is fairly frantic, but you can take some pressure off yourself by presetting dice to the symbol you need – this is the purpose of the oarsman bid in the auction. As players ‘finish’ the race, they’re encouraged to shout the family names of Noli’s player colours: Ciassa! Maina! Burgu! Portellu! The first to finish will take cards from the juicy I stack, second place from the II stack and so on down to the paltry IV cards, and how many cards you take is equal to how many boats you own – which is why bidding for extra boats can be very helpful! Everyone begins with two, but you can potentially have as many as four.

The cards are revealed and, most often, simply tell you how much money you’ll have in the next round. But sometimes they’ll allow you to sink an opponent’s boat, or tell you to destroy some of the city defences (see the walls in the pictures), representing attacking Saracens. However, if all the defences have been destroyed, then you remove a block from someone’s tower instead!

What this all equates to is a feisty game of second-guessing and brinkmanship where figuring out your opponent’s intentions is as important as knowing your own – along with a bananas, manic, dice-chucking boat race every round.