This die enters via the “3” column, and will grant you the reward of every space it passes over – so you might get WOOD, then a GEM, then MONEY, then TWO ROTUND HAPPINESS BABY-POINTS – before that die finally comes to a stop in the last action space it used, blocking it for the rest of the round. Let’s say you drop in a white 3, as seen below. Or you might spend your turn dropping one of that round’s available dice into your colony, as if you were dropping awkward balls into a pinball table, which is how you get resources. On your turn you MIGHT spend resources adding tiles that extend your colony, like so: After a game lasting a snappy sixty minutes, the winner will be whoever managed to wring the most Orwellian Happiness Points out of this tricky 6×6 grid. Quinns: While we were playing I took a different tack, imagining that this was the house where I kept all of my creepy, spherical, pale babies.Įach player in Santa Maria is given their own little Spanish colony in South America, one of which you can see above.

That’s just the universal symbol for happiness! Happiness is the currency that can make you, dear player, the winner, if you can just amass enough of it inside your Happiness House. Popping open the almost cartoonishly cute box, which appears to depict Santa Claus as armoured as he is jolly, we’ve got dice! We’ve got charming wooden tokens! We’ve got wonky jungle tiles! We’ve got… is this the terrifying face of an inflated baby, about to burst?! Quinns: It’s fiiiine Paul! This is something we can safely let into our homes to flit happily about, to land on our tables or to watch us from the shelves with its compound eyes. Paul: OH GOD WHERE’S THE SPRAY QUICK OPEN A WINDO.

“Buzz!” spake this box as it arrived in my flat like a gentle but hefty bumblebee, excited to alight on my table. Quinns: There’s quite a bit of buzz around Santa Maria. Santa Maria, Conflict-Free Games, Games for Two

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