Acquire goods, contract ships and fill them with cargo before you send them out to the open sea, to prove you’re the most successful shipping company!
2-6 players, ages 8+
Playing time: 45-90 minutes
Design & Artwork: Jordan Draper
Publisher: Jordan Draper Games
https://www.jordandraper.com/
Import/Export is a tableau/engine building game with multi-use cards.
On their turn, a player can choose to either play a card from their hand, or refill their hand until they have 5 cards.
When playing a card, you declare which action you’re performing: the cards come in 5 different colours, each one representing a different action. Other players have the option to follow by playing a card from their hand with the same action, or draw cards.
The meat of the game comes with the multi-use cards: when fulfilling contracts you’ll slip it underneath your Harbor board, gaining the power shown, but also increasing the limit for crew and goods you can own. Crew members are important as they increase the power of its specific action, and your acquired goods will score points at the end of the game.
The actions:
Supply: either sell a card or take a card from the Supply Island
Import: start an auction for 2 goods from a ship in the open sea. The winner can add these cards to their Harbor as crew/goods
Contract: place a card as a contract onto a ships
Load: place a card as a container onto one of your contracts. When a ship is full, you gain credits, and move the ship to open sea
Pirate: gain a card from open sea or Supply Island and load it into a ship
The game ends when a player has 50 or more credits, players gain additional credits for their leftover containers and collected goods, and the most credits wins!
As is often the case in games with multi-use cards, hand management is very important in Import/Export. The actions you can take in the turn of other players are always useful, especially when you can reinforce them with your extra crew.
Import/Export has often been described as a mix of Container and Glory to Rome, a comparison with which I can fully concur. But for me, what makes the game excel are the different powers of the contracts, which ensure that each game plays completely differently.
Tabletopping 