Ofrenda Board Game Review – Osprey Games

Ofrenda Board Game Review – Osprey Games

If you skip to 01:39:00 you will hear the start of the discussion on Ofrenda from Osprey Games. Hopefully the transcription makes sense. It makes sense to me, because I said the words at the time.

Orlando Sá (Author)

André Santos (Author)

Alex Herrerías (Illustrator)

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Richard: I have been playing Ofrenda from Offspring,

Luke: yes. Yeah.

Richard: which is all about the celebrating the day of the dead.

Luke: you know what the Ofrenda is?

Richard: Ofrenda is that not when you’re

Luke: is your mantle piece, which has pictures of

Richard: Of Of all your relatives.

Luke: on so on. And your, the Ofrenda is always there. I believe it’s always a part of your

Richard: yeah, yeah.

Luke: then on Day of the Dead, it almost becomes the shrine.

Richard: Yeah.

Luke: go to visit the, the graves of your family and then also within your home

Luke: almost like the focal point in your home, more so than it would any other day. You know, like I said to you, I love, I love the concept. I, I kind of knew what Day of the Dead was, but then the movie Cocoa came out

Richard: oh

Luke: fell in love with what The Day of the Dead and the Ofrenda and that whole, I truly fell in love with that whole concept.

And I think it’s a beautiful, beautiful concept. And I wish we, I wish it was a thing here.

Richard: yeah.

Luke: do. ’cause I

Richard: I think

Luke: I think too often in, in, in England or the UK or whatever, is that it’s very dour losing

Richard: course it is.

Luke: you know, you, you do get now like celebrations of life and stuff, but it’s all, it’s, it’s not really a bloody celebration of

Richard: No, it’s always a little bit,

Luke: pretty Dow affair, you know, and it’s and then you go to a wake full of bitter of cousins who got left out the will,

Richard: they’ve got like a fiver and a pair of like brown broken shoes that nobody kind of likes. I’m kind of. Like Ofrenda reminds me of Encanto

Luke: yeah.

Richard: in some ways because it’s all about, it’s basically about arranging, it’s a Tableau building game, but it’s a kind of a mixture of a Tableau building game and a puzzle game.

And you are  trying to basically fulfil all of your relatives wishes. ’cause every card has, there’s a relative that has got two sides of the card. So this one of the sides of the card is lit to say that they’ve been satisfied with what their requirements are. And the other side is the kind of the unlit side, which is their spirit side, which is basically says is, I would like to have, you know, two.

Two, like two, two of certain, two certain icons. So you get different icons. There’s like the skull icon, there’s like the drink icon. You get the candy icon, you get the ball of icon, you get like, you know, various different icons and you’re building up a tableau. And based on how you build up your tableau, you’re going to each, each relative has like a symbol, which is the symbol that they offer.

And they have a requirement, which is usually different from the symbol that they have on them. And they sometimes they want to be, they want to be surrounded by that symbol, or at least must, must at least be in close proximity or adjacent to somebody that has that symbol. Or they might, they might need more than one of that symbol, or they might need not want to have that symbol at all.

But also on each of the symbols, there’s also a shape as well, a shape or a colour. So you’ve got like a purple square or a pink hex again, or you know, kind of different shape. So on your turn you, there’s a, there’s a row of cards and you are basically selecting a card from left to right and you have your currency as marigolds.

So if you want to select like the second card into a row, you would have to put a marigot down on the first card. And then you’re able to take the second card. If you want to take like the fourth card in the row, you have to put a marigold on the first three cards before you can take the fourth, the fourth card.

And then above that there’s also a row of candles. And the candles basically offer like a universal bonus based on, again, you fulfilling certain requirements. So they might say, you must have the, you must have the most skulls on your tableau of everybody else, or you must have at least kind of four of this, or five of this, or six of this.

Okay. So basically as you go, you are picking cards, you’re buying cards, you’re putting them on your Tableau. And then if you, if you have like a single card with two cards below it, it’s almost like you’ve got like a, a group of three cards together intersecting those three cards. They’re either going to be a candle symbol or there’s going to be a marigold space.

And what you can do is you can either put a marigold there, which you’ll get points for, or you can put one of the candle tokens that you’ve purchased and you can put it into that space to basically potentially activate it. And that then that can be kind of traded in or actioned [00:05:00] whenever you fulfil the criteria for it.

And it’s kind of an interesting game because it’s, while it’s a puzzle game, you’re not ever going to necessarily fulfil the wishes for every single family member.

Luke: Right.

Richard: And and. When it’s laid out and when people start and when, when cards start to kind of like, get their wishes fulfilled, then it goes from being this kind of dull and grey kind of looking offend into a place that’s like beautiful and light and colourful and everything like that.

Luke: Hmm.

Richard: And it, and, and it plays fine. And I, I have a couple of, I have a couple of ni niggles, which are quality of life. Niggles. There’s no, there’s 12 rounds, right? But if you, during your turn, if you run out of a, if you run out of marigolds, what [00:06:00] you can do is instead of actually placing a card on the tableau, you can trade that card in for three marigolds.

So aye, during the game, marigolds can be quite difficult to get hold of. So there are occasions where you might, it can be difficult to tell what round everybody’s on. There’s not a round tracker. So you have to kind of, it is kind of weird that like there’s this beautiful, all this beautiful art and you’ve got all these, you’ve got these lovely dual layered boards with sunken spaces for where you put the marigolds and where you put like the candles and where you put the individual cards and you can flip them over.

And when you place cards in certain slots, sometimes you’ll actually get an extra Margo and sometimes it’ll cost you a Margo to place a card and they’re like, it costs you a Margo to place a card in like one of the center central slots because you, you’ve got more space where you can place the right surrounding cards which are gonna fulfill the objectives.

So it seems [00:07:00] to, it’s just, I don’t know if it’s an overlook thing, but it just, there doesn’t seem to be like a round tracker, which is fine. But if you’re having to trade in cards, then it’s a bit of a kind of like, where are we? What are we doing and what round are we on? And you tend to tell almost like keep going until all the cards are fulfilled.

And that’s, you know, that’s not, you know, that’s not an issue. And that’s fine. It’s a little bit kind of, that was a little bit frustrating. But the main one was the economy, the card selection and the economy doesn’t always a hundred percent work for me. Now when I played it with, when I played it. And I also like people at the group also played it, but they played it independently of me.

Luke: Right,

Richard: So I was like, what do you think of this? And we all discovered the same thing, which there didn’t seem to be what was, there didn’t seem to be a way to guarantee that you had enough marigolds. ’cause at a certain point during the [00:08:00] game, yes, marigolds are the currency that you use to buy cards. But also when you build up these little sets of, kind of like three cards where you’ve got like a little triangle of cards, the top and maybe two at the bottom or whatever, in order to be able to score that at the end of the game, you, you’re either gonna put a marigold or you’re gonna put a, a candle in there, depending on what the symbol says.

If you put a marigold in there, you’re only able to take the marigold from your supply. So you’re essentially stopping your, you’re reducing your ability to buy an next card by one. Marigold and marigolds aren’t necessarily very, very easy to, in my experience, weren’t very, very easy to get hold of. And if you are trying to get a card on, as you get into the game and you’re trying to get a card in like maybe the second or third space, you’re not necessarily wanting to put a marigold on the first two spaces.

’cause you know, the next person that comes along is going to basically pick up that card. They’re going to get awarded with all [00:09:00] the marigolds kind of there. So I never felt, I never felt at any point that I had enough choice, enough marigolds to be able to then buy any car that I needed.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Richard: Sometimes I felt I was reduced to taking the first card that was on the roll because it was free.

And then doing the best that what was there. Now I could have, what I could have done is I could have taken that.

Luke: than, yeah. Rather than spend to potentially help somebody else

Richard: Yes.

Luke: than helped yourself. Yeah.

Richard: So I kind of felt, I was kind of like, sometimes I was like, I have to take this card because I don’t have, well no, I have to take this card because I have only got two marigolds left. But if I put one down, one marigold, I know that by placing this card here, I’m going to end up creating two or three of these triangles where I’m going to play some marigold, which is going to stop me from [00:10:00] scoring at the end game.

Luke: Hmm.

Richard: that was a bit kind of weird. And the other thing was, is that and this, this was only highlighted to me because we played Castle combo just before we played it was that in Castle combo, if you don’t like the cards that are there, what you do, you spend a key, you wipe the cards out. Yeah.

Luke: Hmm.

Richard: There isn’t a way to clear, there isn’t a way to clear the row of cards that come up on the game.

Luke: Right,

Richard: So you can end up, you can end up in this kind of, this, this double, this double kind of pincher movement where the far you, you can’t afford to. To get the card that’s maybe three or four in that you really, really want. But also all the cards that are in the role do absolutely nothing for you whatsoever.

And as you reach towards end game, you need to have a little bit more agency. So rather than can Castle combo, it’s, it’s a double [00:11:00] thing. You could like look at what everybody else is needing. You could just go, haha, I’m going to clear the entire row and screw you. Whereas in this, you’re like feeling, well everybody, if nobody’s getting the cards that anybody wants, people end up buying cards just for the sake of buying cars.

They can’t buy the second or third one along because nobody’s got enough marigolds. So, so it was a bit, it was fine. It was lovely looking and I’m still, I’m still on the fence about it because I’m pretty sure there is some way I was double checking and saying, am I doing this wrong? Am I playing this wrong?

Because I don’t seem to be able to get, I’m not, I’m not, I don’t seem to be sitting here with four or five or six marigolds at any time that I can use a currency. I always seem to be scraping by. And I was wondering, do you know, you wonder if you, like you’re playing a game, you’re wondering if you’re playing it wrong.

Luke: Yeah. You just think [00:12:00] this, you know why. Yeah. This is, it’s hurting itself, or, and you do you think, and it is so obvious to everybody as well, you’re all having the same issue

Richard: Yeah,

Luke: well, surely we must be, we’re misreading a rule here, because otherwise it would’ve come up in play testing and they, they’d have done something about it, you know,

Richard: I’ve , yeah, I’ve , I’ve gone through it kind of again and again, and I’ve went, okay, am I definitely, am I missing something here? Is it because, and I guess one of my things to myself was, right, there’s only ever four cards that you can take. Is it because this is actually one of these games that needs to be played with four players, and that’s what gets the economy going, if you know what I mean.

Luke: It’s limited in that sense.

Richard: You know? So, I don’t know. I’m not saying, see, production wise, it’s beautiful, see how the game plays as a base level. It’s be, it’s like, it’s actually pretty fun. And there’s this lovely puzzley element where you’re trying to [00:13:00] go, okay, well if I get this card, I can put this here. And then that means I only need to get this one here.

And I’ve already got three cards in my hand. So I know that one of the cards that I’ve got here, I can definitely place there. Which means that means I can do this one, this one, and this one, and get lots and lots of points. But there was just one thing where it was almost a case of I felt that I couldn’t do everything that I wanted to do.

And it wasn’t because the cars, it was, it was a combination of I didn’t have enough money to be able to do it. Or I didn’t have an I, the cards just weren’t there and there was nothing I could do about the kind of the crappy selection of cards that was there.

Luke: Hmm.

Richard: But at the same time, I didn’t have a bad time.

I didn’t feel, you know, I didn’t walk away going, oh, this, that was crap. You know, that was a waste of my time. I could see a game in there. Yeah. It was just like the round thing. The round thing was funny ’cause we got halfway through the game and we went, [00:14:00] we round seven, round eight. And it’s like, I,

Luke: I don’t know.

Richard: I don’t know.

’cause how many cards have you got? And it’s like, oh, remember, I’ve traded in one of my cards already, so I I’m going to automatically have less cards than you. And it’s like, oh, all right. Okay. Okay. So where are we with that then thing. So yeah, and it’s, it’s funny because as far as a game goes, I think it’s like in the portfolio of Osprey games where it’s more on the casual side of stuff.

You know, like where you’re crypted and stuff like that, it sits, it’s not your work, it’s not as, it’s not as heavy euro as say, like, you know, Merv or

Luke: yeah, I mean, I was going to say, some of that stuff is pretty frigging heavy.

Richard: Yeah, it is. Yeah. Yeah.

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So, I still think there’s a few games of Ofrenda needing to be played to see if the economy is still an issue when playing. I’ve since spoken to friends who played the game and didn’t find the lack of resources as big of an issue. It is a lovely looking game, and the subject matter is tastefully done and lovely to look at and so I’ll probably get Ofrenda to the table again before long before sending it down to Luke for him to give it a try.