Cruise

Cruise is first and foremost a card game. The cards depicts shares divided into different cruise-companies, and the players must collect the majority of the company. The deck also includes som special shares, "gold shares", which are more valuable than the other and gives the player a higher turnout when exchanging the shares for ships. Each player starts the game with seven cards (shares) and 60.000 in cash. When it is a player's turn he can chose between the following actions:

1. Buy up to three shares from the bank. The price is 10.000 for each and must be purchased from the bank, not from another player.
2. Put one of his shares up for auction. The bank (who is controlled by one of the other players), always open the bidding by turning the upper-most card in the shares deck. Then the other players can raise the bid with money and/or other shares from their hand. After each bidding round, and before the next starts, the auctioneer decides who has the best bid. Then the players may raise their bids until there is only one player left, and he gets the share.
3. Sell ships. A player can sell up to three ships to the bank. For each share the player gets two shares and 20.000,- in cash.

At the end of the round each player may buy ships, depending on what combinations of shares they have played. You can either save up cards and play them out at once (thus doing a surprise take-over of the game), or gradually build yourself up.

Evaluation

As a quick and entertaining game I find Cruise to be a good one. The players have a lot of choices each round, and bluffing the other players is also a possibility. As a game mechanic, auctions are well-known and works good, and they often bring in a whole new level of interaction and dynamics between the players. The auctions adds a lot to this game too, and it prevents the game from being too static and boring. Another good ting with this game is the fact that it is free from downtime (ie. when a player has nothing to do but to wait for the other players to do their turn). The game's design and production, however, is not so good. As always with games from Damm, Cruise is manufactured with simple and unattractive illustrations and components. If the publisher had given a little more attention to the design, I think it could have turned into a bigger game, and that would have been suitable in Norway with all the shipping traditions we have here.

The basic ideas in Cruise is great, but all in all the game does not quite match the best in it's genre.

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