Ceylon

Ceylon is a game about tea. This is shocking, I know. It is a game where two to four players spend about an hour building tea plantations, collecting tea, and fulfilling contracts. A game where players will spend the first five minutes creating the board upon which they will play.

Oh? What’s that you ask? How are players building the board? Well. The board is divided up into four regions. At the beginning of the game, each player will receive a four hex piece and choose how to place it on their section of the board. Then, they will take the one hex piece and place it somewhere on top of their four hex piece, thus creating a three levels in each region. This is important because the type of tea produced by a plantation depends on its elevation: black tea at level 0, green at level 1, and white at level 2. Divide up how to build the remaining regions when playing with less than four players in whichever manner seems fair: rolling dice, flipping a coin, dueling to first blood. I will not judge.

During the game, each player will have a hand of three cards. Each card has two main actions and two neutral actions to choose from. I’ll get to what all of those are in a moment. On each player’s turn, they will choose one of the cards in their hand and play it. The current player will get to do one of the main actions while everyone else will get to do the other.

The five main actions are:

• Planting: on a blank space, put a plantation and add a tea leave. This costs 5 coins.
• Counselor: Place one of your disks on the counselor in the region you are in. Gain their ability for the rest of the game. There are multiple different counselors, so the ones available each game will change.
• Harvest: Harvest any or all plantations within one space. Harvesting from other players’ plantations will give them one VP. You can hold a maximum of five cubes.
• Technology: Go up on the technology track and gain a technology token. The tech track is used to break any ties. A tech token can be spent on your turn to take any action on the card (but the technology action (yes, you can take the same action twice)). This costs 5 coins and each other player gains one.
• Sell: Trade cubes to complete one of the face-up contracts if there is an empty tea slot on your board. Similarly number/colored contracts will stack. Each contract is worth either points or money.

Alternatively, any player may choose to do one of the neutral actions. The neutral actions are move one space (or pay increasing values 1/3/6/etc to move an extra 1/2/3/etc spaces) or collect two coins. This continues until either the action deck runs out or a player places their final plantation. The round the finishes.

Players then determine their final score with the following categories:

1) There are seven ranked tracks worth 10/6/3/1 point(s) for 1st/2nd/3rd/4th place in each of them. These tracks are remaining money, the technology track, having planted in each region (claimed during play), and then, for each region, the majority plantations in it among those who have a disk on the counselor for that region. Yes, the last one makes up four tracks. Yes, if you have the most plantations in a region but no disk on the counselor you are not even in the running or blocking the first place.

2) For the contracts you’ve completed: 1/3/6/10/15 for the number of unique companies (color/number)

3) You then lose two points for each remaining tea leave on your board.

Ceylon’s gameplay is smooth. Ridiculously, ridiculously smooth. Every turn, each player will be able to make a meaningful, useful choice, even if the active player has managed to pick an action that everyone else is incapable of doing. The game goes faster than it feels, once you get into the flow of things. Because everyone gets to draw from all the plantations, even the choices you get to make at the very beginning have a lasting impact. Do you allow there to be a concentration of high locations near each other to encourage your opponents to use your plantations? Do you take tea from your opponents’ plantations and give them the victory points?

The only complaints I have are that I wish that both card halves were oriented with the center as the bottom of the picture and that the meeples were slightly more stable. These are really very, very minor.