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As the governor of a thriving Roman colony on the Mediterranean, you’re in charge of building ships, managing resources, and establishing trade with powerful cities across the sea. Your success depends on careful planning, shrewd trading, and a bit of luck as you navigate the bustling hub of Carthage, where fortunes are made and lost. Will your colony thrive and dominate the trade routes, or will your rivals leave you struggling to keep up?
👥 2-4 players, ages 13+
⌛ Playing time: 45-120 minutes
📝 Designer: Matteo De Nardis
🎨 Artwork: Daniel Cunha
🏢 Publisher: Archona Games (preview copy provided)
Check out the Kickstarter campaign by clicking here
Gameplay Overview
The game plays out over six rounds, and in each round, every player takes two turns.
Each turn starts with a draft phase. The starting player rolls a set number of dice, depending on how many players are in the game, and then begins the drafting. One by one, everyone picks a die until each player has two. The color of the dice determines what actions you can take, while the die’s value determines how powerful those actions will be.
Once everyone has their dice, turn order is decided by adding up the pips on each player’s dice. The player with the lowest total goes first, followed by the next lowest, and so on. This leads into the action phase.
On your turn, you’ll place both of your dice on the map board, assigning them to district tiles in slots that match their color. Each die can connect to either one or two tiles. If a die is connected to just one tile, you activate that tile based on the pip value of the die. If it’s placed in a slot connected to two tiles, you can activate both, but you’ll need to split the pip value between them, which reduces the strength of each action.
As more dice are placed, things start to get tricky. Dice that were previously placed on a tile with a single connection will virtually reduce the pip value of any new dice placed there, limiting the effectiveness of that tile’s activation.
The district tiles provide resources like sails, planks, metal, and rope. You can also recruit colonists to work for you, gain favor tokens, and acquire building, people, and ship cards.
Beyond placing dice, you can take as many extra actions as you can afford. You might decide to construct or repair ships and send them on missions. You can expand your colony by building dock huts, insulas, and other structures. People cards add new abilities and opportunities to your strategy. Colonists can either be sent to crew your ships or put to work crafting luxury goods.
Every card you play, whether it’s a ship, a building, or a people card, moves your markers forward on the senate board. As you progress, you’ll unlock bonuses that can give you an edge in the game.
The Voyage Phase – Facing the High Seas
Once all players have finished their turns, it’s time to set sail. Merchant ships head out on their voyages, but the open sea isn’t safe. Pirates lurk along the trade routes, ready to attack.
If a ship manages to fight off the pirates, the owner has a choice. They can either push forward to the next trading post, where the rewards become more valuable the farther they go, but with each step, they risk facing another pirate attack. Or they can play it safe and stop at their current trading post to exchange goods for prestige tokens and coins. But if the pirates overpower the ship, it takes damage and must retreat to port for repairs before it can set sail again.
At the end of the voyage phase, ships begin their journey home, and the first player marker is passed to the next player. A new turn begins, and the cycle continues.
End of the Round & Final Scoring
After every two turns, the round ends. Any colonists who weren’t put to work generate taxes, adding to your wealth. The dice bag is refilled, and a new round begins.
After six rounds, it’s time for the final scoring. Players add up points from their played cards, built dock huts and insulas, and any prestige tokens they earned throughout the game. Once the scores are counted, the player with the most points wins, cementing their name in history as the most prosperous governor to ever rule the Mediterranean.
Game Info
The Great Harbor is a mid-weight strategy game designed for two to four players, recommended for ages 13 and up. From our experience, a full game takes about 75 to 90 minutes, depending on how many players are at the table and how much time is spent carefully considering the best dice placements.
Designed by Matteo De Nardis and published by Archona Games, this game might sound familiar if you’ve played Magna Roma, which shares the same setting. While Magna Roma focused on city-building, The Great Harbor shifts the focus to the sea, where trade, shipbuilding, and tactical dice placement are the heart of the action.
This game is being launched through a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, setting sail on March 11.
Components, Production, and Artwork
Before jumping into the components, a quick note. We played a preview copy provided by Archona Games, so while we expect the final version to be pretty close to what we’ve seen, some details may still change. That being said, we already have a solid impression of the production quality.
The central map board is made up of four interlocking pieces, making it easy to assemble and store. The nine district tiles are arranged randomly each game, ensuring a fresh layout every time you play. There’s also a trade board for managing ship voyages and a senate board that tracks progress on four different development tracks.
A drawstring dice bag holds twenty dice in four colors, which players draw from at the start of each turn. Each player has their own colony board, along with a set of wooden ships, dock huts, and insulae in their player color. The game also comes with several decks of cards, including ship cards for upgrading your fleet, people cards with special abilities, building cards for expanding your colony, and pirate cards that, as you’d expect, cause trouble during voyages.
In addition to all that, the game includes plenty of tokens representing resources, prestige points, coins, favors, smugglers, and ship damage. There’s a lot in the box, but it never feels overwhelming. Everything has its place, and once you get going, managing the components feels intuitive.
Now, let’s talk about the artwork. The illustrations, created by Daniel Cunha, fit the historical theme and give the game a polished look. The iconography is clear and functional, which is always a plus. For us, the visuals are more practical than eye-catching. They do the job well, but they didn’t particularly stand out. Of course, that’s purely a matter of taste. If you love clean, straightforward design, you’ll probably appreciate it more than we did. If you’re looking for something visually striking, though, this might not be the game that grabs you.
Gameplay Experience
At its core, The Great Harbor is a dice drafting and placement game with strong elements of resource management and engine building. The rules are easy to grasp, but once you start playing, you realize there’s a lot to think about.
Teaching the game doesn’t take too long, usually around twenty minutes. The mechanics are intuitive, but this isn’t a game where you can just pick some dice and see what happens. Every choice matters, from the dice you draft to where you place them on the board. Since turn order is determined by the total value of your dice, you’ll often have to decide whether to take stronger dice for better actions or go for lower values to play earlier in the round.
One of the best parts of the game is how interactive the dice placement is. Every die you place not only affects your own plans but also changes what’s available to your opponents. Because players place both of their dice in the same turn, you can easily block key spaces or weaken someone else’s action. Timing is everything. If you position your dice well, you can squeeze the most value out of your turn while also making things more difficult for your rivals.
This is especially true for dice placed on the outer edges of the board. Once a die is there, it limits future placements for that tile, making it harder for other players to get the full benefit from their own dice. It’s a simple but clever system that keeps every placement interesting. If you’re not paying attention to what others are doing, you might find yourself suddenly short on a crucial resource because someone else blocked the best placement spot.
Beyond dice placement, there are multiple ways to approach the game. You can focus on trading, growing your colony, or a mix of both, but ultimately, you’ll need to balance different strategies rather than go all in on one thing. The game builds momentum over time, with the early rounds feeling a bit slower and the later rounds picking up speed as more options open up. Turns can take a little longer with four players, especially if someone likes to weigh every possible move carefully, but overall, the game moves at a steady pace.
Final Thoughts
For us, one of the biggest strengths of The Great Harbor is how every decision has weight. The dice placement mechanics are really well done, creating a game where your actions don’t just affect your own plans but also influence what your opponents can do. There’s a constant push and pull as you try to optimize your own turn while keeping an eye on how your moves might disrupt someone else’s strategy. If you enjoy that kind of player interaction, you’ll likely have a great time with it.
We also really liked the voyage phase. The push-your-luck element adds just the right amount of tension, especially when someone decides to take a risk, hoping to make it to a more valuable trading post—only to get wrecked by pirates and have to limp back to port. Those high-stakes moments always add some excitement to the game. Of course, if you prefer more predictable strategy without that element of luck, this part might not be as appealing.
That being said, this isn’t exactly a light game. The mechanics are easy to understand, but there’s a good amount of strategy involved, and it can be punishing if you don’t plan ahead. We enjoyed the depth, but if you prefer something more relaxed, where you can go with the flow and still do well, this might feel a bit too thinky.
So, is this the game for you? If you like games where every choice matters, enjoy dice drafting with an interactive twist, and don’t mind a bit of competition when it comes to blocking spots, this is definitely a game worth checking out.
At its heart, The Great Harbor is all about making strategic moves, adapting to ever-changing conditions, and staying one step ahead of your rivals. If that’s the kind of challenge you enjoy, this game will keep you engaged from start to finish.
📝 We received a preview copy of the game from Archona Games.
