Designed by: Serge Laget
Cargo Noir is a game of smuggling goods where players take turns to bid for contraband, and the shrewdest judge of when to bid or bail will win.
The board shows various locations where the illegal goods everyone’s after are placed, to be bid on. On your turn, you can place your ships – ships represent your presence at the location in question and allow you to either get money, trade contraband, or bid on claiming the contraband from that particular location. Players have the opportunity to outbid each other continuously, until all but one drop out of the bidding. After that moment, players claim everything they bid on and add it to their individual player board (the warehouse). Contraband goods on your player board can then be traded in for Victory Spoils (points!) or more ships to further your cause during the game. This is where it gets more interesting – because sets of the same type of contraband are more valuable than a mixed bag, competition over what’s in a port can really start to heat up during the game.
There are certain Victory Spoils that not only score you points at the game’s end but allow you extra ships or space in your warehouse to store goods, or even allow you to take cash when you drop out of the bidding.
The game, then, is essentially a series of bids over a set number of rounds that will vary depending on how many players you have. When the rounds are up, players count up their Victory Spoils cards to determine who is the winner.
Low really - you can be outbid, but no-one can steal from you. For a game about gangsters, it's pretty amenable.
Low to moderate, depending on who's playing.
Nothing too heavy, but sometimes you'll need to conjure a Plan B at short notice.
Plenty of variety in how the contraband comes into play, and variations in tactics too.
2-5
Players
8+
Years
60-90
Mins
Sam says
If you've never played anything other than Monopoly, this will be an eye-opener in terms of how quickly a game can play and the amount of interaction and room for tactics it has - when compared to a turn consisting of rolling a dice and hoping for the best. The artwork here is friendly and the rules are easy to pick up. For me, as a nerd of long-standing and many-games-played, I found it odd that a game about smuggling functions via bidding: I'm no district attorney but I don't think bidding is a key element of the business. And outside of the bidding, there's not a huge amount going on here. In summary; not pooh-poohing it, but not getting all that excited about it either. If you enjoy bidding my game of recommendation would be Ra, and the others linked to here.