Cargo Noir Board Game Review

Rating: 3.5/5.0

Enter the world of illicit trade and smuggled goods in Cargo Noir, a trading and bidding board game! Take control of a trading family and compete against rival clans to obtain the most smuggled goods from ports all over the world. Use your ill-gotten gains to buy up lucrative businesses and become the most powerful family in the trading underworld!

Cargo Noir is a board game by Serge Laget, the prolific designer (or co-designer) of other board games such as Shadows Over Camelot and Mare Nostrum. It is thematically a noirish game about rival families competing to acquire smuggled cargo and lucrative businesses. In terms of gameplay, the main game mechanics involve bidding against your fellow players for cargo, and strategically placing your trading fleet to obtain the most useful cargo.

The goal of the game is to use your trading fleet and cash to bid for precious cargo from various ports around the world. This cargo is then accumulated and used to buy up various luxuries and businesses that provide victory points. The player with the most victory points at the end of the game (which lasts 10 or 11 rounds depending on the number of players) wins the game.

Each player starts with a limited amount of coins (used for bids) and ships to represent their family’s initial trading empire. The bidding portion of the game takes place on a board featuring various ports from around the world (with more ports being available the more people are playing the game). Each port contains 1 to 4 cargo slots which are randomly filled with cargo tokens from a bag.

The bidding gameplay may not seem intuitive at first, but once you get the hang of it, you will find that it is really simple and elegant. During each player’s turn, he can assign any or all of his ships to bid on any port’s cargo. He also places however many coins he wants together with each bid. Once the bids are placed, the turn moves to the next player and so on. When it comes back to the original player’s turn and his bids have not been outbid by other players, he then wins the bid and claims the cargo in the port. He takes the cargo tokens, and the port’s cargo slots are refilled from the bag. If he is outbid, he doesn’t earn anything but gets his bid money back.

This part of the game basically boils down to whether you want to place a high bid in order to guarantee winning the port’s cargo, or place a lower bid hoping to get it for cheap, but with the risk of losing the bid and essentially losing a turn for one of your ships. In addition to the ports, there are 2 other locations you can place your ships. Placing a ship in the casino will earn you 2 coins; and placing a ship at the black market allows you to either randomly gain a cargo token from the bag, or exchange one of your cargo tokens with another token from the market.

Once you have accumulated enough cargo, you can trade them in for various assets. The trade value will depend on what combination of cargo tokens you have. For each different cargo token you trade in, the value increases in a triangular fashion. So 1 token is worth 1, 2 tokens are worth 3, 3 tokens are worth 6 and so on, in a 1 3 6 10 15… sequence. However, if you manage to accumulate multiple tokens of the same kind, their value increases in a square 1 4 9 16 25… sequence. So your bidding strategy will also depend on what cargo types you are after, and whether you are aiming for multiple cargo tokens of the same type, or one of each type.

The assets that you can buy with the cargo can be split into 2 categories. There are the pure victory point assets (some of which are unique and limited) which just give you victory points when bought. The higher their cost, the better victory point returns they are. There are also 3 “useful” assets: the Warehouse, Syndicate Office, and Cargo Ship. These assets don’t provide much victory points, but provide powerful benefits instead. The Warehouse lets you store additional cargo tokens, the Syndicate Office lets you earn 2 coins whenever you get outbid, and the Cargo Ship gives you another ship token with which to use for bids. These assets are limited as well, so you may not be able to get them if you are too slow.

While the gameplay mechanics are very simple, the game can become quite complex and cutthroat as players attempt to outmaneuver each other. You may be bidding to obtain a crucial cargo token, or to deny your opponents from getting it. You may want to place a bid in order to hinder the efforts of the player with the most victory points, but at the cost of your own efficiency. 10 rounds of bidding may sound like a short game, but the amount of strategizing and second-guessing involved turns it into an intense hour-long competition.

The quality of the game board and tokens are also really good, as expected from a Days of Wonder game. The artwork is also great in a cartoony way, bringing out the noir and underground theme. Overall, Cargo Noir is a fun competitive game, especially if the players are at about the same experience level. You will love it if you like other bidding games such as Power Grid or Vegas Showdown, or shipping games such as Le Havre.

Complexity: 2.5/5.0

Playing Time: 60 minutes

Number of Players: 2 to 5 players

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