Bosa, a small town on the coast of Sardinia, is the setting for this engine-building card game in which players draft cards and compete to build the most successful townscape.
What Is Bosa?
Bosa is a game for 2-5 players, ages 8 and up, and takes about 45 minutes to play. It’s currently available at Barnes & Noble and other retailers for $24.95.
Bosa was designed by Prospero Hall and published by Funko.
Bosa Components
Inside the box, you’ll find:
- Cardboard castle board
- 5 cardboard player boards
- 5 wooden score markers
- 15 wooden resource trackers
- 96 building cards
- 20 goal cards
- 70 cardboard coins
- Cardboard coin tray
- 10 cardboad 100 point tokens
- First player token
- 2 envelopes
- Rulebook
All of the components are extremely high quality and gorgeously colorful.
The castle board, used for scoring, is mostly just a grid, 1-100, although it also has a glossary of icons and a reminder of the end-of-season patronage amounts.
The player boards are dual-layer, with indented tracks to hold the resource tokens. This is a very nice added touch, as it nicely holds the token in place while still making them easy to move as needed. The right edge of the baord is designed to provide a template for lining up the buildings, and the whole thing is sized to avoid any confusion as to the number of rows you can have. There’s an icon in the bottom left showing each player’s symbol, but otherwise all of the boards are identical.
The wooden score markers are simply small cutouts of the five player symbols: a camera, a seashell, a sun, a Vespa, and a paint palette. It’s a small thing, but I like that the designers skipped the normal color coding of player pieces and chose thematic symbols instead. The score markers are nicely sized, too–they aren’t so small that they’re impossible to pick up, but they are small enough to fit nicely on the score track on the castle board.
The resource trackers are likewise nicely designed wood pieces. There are five set of three trackers: one fish, one textile, and one pottery for each of the five potential players. The pieces are again nicely sized to fix just right in the tracks on the player boards, being both large enough to not twist in the tracks, while being small enough to fit nicely and only cover a single number at a time, thus elimnating potential confusion.
The building cards are perfect in their simplicity. There are actually four decks of cards: a deck of starting cards, and then a deck for each of the three seasons. The backs clearly denote which deck a card is in, while the front uses a set of simple icons to show what the card does. This section is perfectly sized to allow it to remain visible as you build down, while the rest of the card has nice artwork that makes your townscape seem complete when while you’re still building.
The goal cards are a set of sqaure cards that show show a number of points and a sentence describing what you need to do to earn the points. I like that they used words here instead of icons; while it’s easy to look up icons, doing so would often accidentally reveal the goal to other players.
The cardboard coin tray is an ingeniously designed tray that hold together during play and then quickly comes apart to be stored flat.
The cardboard coins and 100 point tokens are simple, which is why they work so well. Because the points are not secret, the denominations are sized differently, making them easy to tally at a glance.
The envelopes are another really nice touch. The game’s only use of plastic is the coating on the cards. Otherwise, everything is wood or paper. While a lot of games are trying to limit plastic, many overlook storage, meaning that the game might not have plastic components but then require owners to pull out plastic bags to store the game. By providing these envelopes, Funko has remembered that we don’t keep games out on the table permenately, and has provided a non-plastic way to store the components. So, kudos for that.
I also want to mention that the box for the game is nicely sized as well. Everything fits back into the box without having to be a master Tetris player, and yet there’s not a lot of space left over–and thus, not a lot of wasted packaging materials. There’s a cardboard insert that holds everything in place, even when the game is stored vertically.
How to Play Bosa
You can download a copy of the rulebook here.
The Goal
The goal of the game is end up with the most points at the end of three seasons. Points are earned directly from cards, by paying for patronage from the castle at the end of each round, and by completing goals.
Setup
Place the castle board in the middle of the table. All players select a symbol and take the corresponding player board and their matching score marker on the zero space on the castle board.
The cards are separated into the four decks, with each shuffled individually. Then, a number of cards are removed from each season based on the player count: for 2 players, 17 cards are removed; for 3, 12 cards; for 4, 7 cards; and for five, 2 cards. Note that removing cards not only puts exactly the right number of cards in the deck for each season, it also means that there always cards not being used (even with all 5 players), so card counting is essentially impossible.
Once the decks are shuffled and cards removed, the top four cards from deck one are revealed and placed under the castle board.
Players take one set of resource tokens and place them on the “1” space on each track on their player board. Players each take a random start card and place it next to their player board, aligned with the top right.
You can choose to play without the goal cards, but once you’re familiar with the game they add extra strategy choices. If used, the deck is shuffled and each player is given 4 of them that they will keep. At the end of the game, however, only 2 cards may be scored.
Assemble the coin holder. Give each player 3 coins, then place the rest of the coins in the holder.
The player who last visited an island goes first.
Gameplay
On your turn, you will perform three steps.
First, you will take one of the face-up building cards. You can always take any card you wish.
Second, you will place the card. Each card must be placed immediately adjacent to a card that is already on the board. Players are completing a 4×4 grid. A card placed directly to the right of an exsiting card is simply placed next to it. A card placed below an extisting card should overlap so that only the top half of the previously-placed card is visible. You must build a 4×4 grid, so you cannot expand to a fifth row or column. You also cannot leave gaps: each card must be placed as high on the column and as far to the left on the row as possible.
Third, you will activate the actions on the row or column where you placed the card. You can always choose whether to activate the row or the column, but you can never do both. All actions are activated top to bottom, or left to right, and while you can choose to skip a card and not activate it, cards must be activated in order. Therefore, the card you placed this turn will always be last. Actions that cannot be performed are simply skipped.
After you activate the actions, you flip over a new card to refill those available, and the next player takes their turn. This continues until the row cannot be refilled, at which point the season ends.
The activation phase described above is the core of the game. As you place cards, you want to place them where the actions from the prior cards will have the most effect.
In general, cards do one or more of the following:
- Allow you to gain one or more resources, which you do by sliding the corresponding resource counter up on your player board.
- Allow you to gain one or more coins, which you do by simply taking the coins from the tray, making change as needed.
- Spend coins to gain resources, which you do by returning the coins to the tray and then sliding the resource marker up.
- Spend resources for points, which you do by sliding the resource marker down and then moving your scoring marker.
- Spend resources to gain both points and coins.
- Activate a card somewhere else on our townscape.
Each card is in one of six colors. While the colors don’t matter for the placement rules, many of the cards are able to generate coins or resources based on how many of a particular color you have in your townscape.
Placement of the cards is critical, as no card may be moved after being placed. You have to carefully consider how the cards will activate, and make sure you have sufficient coins or resources before needing to activate a card that spends those. While it is possible to skip activating any card, each card will at most be activated 7 or 8 times, so you don’t want to waste those chances.
End of a Season
Once the row of available cards cannot be filled, the season ends. Each player will take exactly 5 turns each season, and the person to the left of the starting player will always go last. Once the season is over, all players must pay money towards the patronage at the castle. There is a chart on the castle board for this. Players essentially just tally up their available coins and pay the most they can, getting points in return. Any left over coins are retained for the next round. If a player has fewer than the minimum coins (4), they simply get no extra points.
Then, the remaining cards from the season are returned to the box. The top four cards from the next season are drawn. The player who has the least number of points becomes the starting player for the next round. If there is a tie, the player closest to the prior round’s starting player, working clockwise, goes first.
Game End
The game ends after the third season. Players pay for patronage and score those points one last time. Players also score one point for each resource they have left. They score nothing for remaining coins.
If goal cards were used, players now reveal all four of their goal cards, choose two and score them.
Players can take a 100 point token if they loop around the score board.
The player with the most points wins. If there’s a tie, the player with the most remaining coins win. If there’s still a tie, players share the victory.
Bosa is GeekDad Approved!
Why You Should Play Bosa
Bosa is a deceptively simple game: it takes only a few minutes to set up and explain, and games are less than a hour. And yet, buring inside the game are multiple levels of deeper strategy.
As with any engine building game, placement of each card is the key to success. The first time I played, I thought I needed to be scoring early, so I focused on grabbing cards that gave me points. But by the second season, I realized my mistake: as my townscape grew, I was consistently short on resources, and so I was unable to continue to benefit from those point-scoring cards, as I often had to try to activate them before I had the coins or resources to do so.
The distribution of the cards in the decks is interesting as well, but it’s build around the obvious strategy that early on, you want cards that generate coins and resources, and later on, ones that use those. So, the deck for the first season is mostly geared towards generation, the second is more balanced, and the third, primarily towards spending resources and coins.
Thanks to my initial strategic blunder, I did lose the first game, but interestingly, I wasn’t blown out. And that speaks to another nice point in the design: the game is very well balanced. There’s an element of luck, of course, in having the card you need available to you is of course an important factor.
The colors of the cards adds yet another interesting element. As stated above, the colors don’t directly matter much in the game, but some cards allow you to gain a number of coins or resources based on the total number of cards of that color in your overall townscape. So, there are times when it might benefit you to take a slightly less advantageous card because it’s the right color to be a multiplier for another card.
The game does not have a lot of player interaction–there’s no way to directly influence or change another player’s townscape–but of course picking up a card this turn to deny it to the next player in line is going to be a factor on most turns, particularly in the third season when a lot of really powerful cards are coming out. But, is it really worth taking that card if you can’t really use it, or do you let your opponent have it, because another card that is available is going to help you more? These are the kinds of calls you’ll be making constantly throughout the game.
While the theme is somewhat secondary to the game, the resources chosen are those that the actual town is known for, but the game does have a somewhat serene feel to it, nicely evoking what I think of when I think about a small European beach town.
While we at GeekDad have not adopted an official policy on the materials used in making a game, it is something that we are starting to pay attention to, and the obvious thought and care that when into the components in Bosa is worth calling out. As I noted early, the only plastic in the game is the coating on the cards. Everything else is either wood or plastic. The biggest component is the castle board, but rather than having it be a single piece and thus mandating a bigger box, it is folded into fourths to allow for the smaller overall packaging. And the paper envelopes to store the components is a great touch as well, something that I hope Funko adopts for others of it games.
Overall, Bosa is a great game that’s easy to learn but contains lots of deep strategy, and it’s intentionally small environment footprint and low cost means that you can add it to your collection not only as a game you’ll enjoy and are likely to bring out a bunch, but also one that you can buy with minimal guilt.
Click here to see all our tabletop game reviews.
To subscribe to GeekDad’s tabletop gaming coverage, please copy this link and add it to your RSS reader.
Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
