The Great Harbor

Headlines from a Solo Player

3 hours ago

6 min read

An excellent dice puzzle searching for a smoother home.

The Great Harbour
Publisher: Archona Games
Designer: Matteo De Nardis
2026

Overview:

Dice aplenty in this game from Archona Games, designed by Matteo De Nardis. Take your seat as a "powerful Roman governor of a Mediterranean colony" and get ready to build some buildings, recruit some helpful people and get some ships-a-sailing.

Each round has three phases:

• Phase One: Pull some coloured dice from a bag, take turns drafting them and then the player with the lowest combined value goes first in placing them out on the main board. Not just anywhere, of course - you need to slot them into spaces of matching colour. Hopefully that space gets you everything that your heart desires. If not though, you could always split the value of the pips to take a lesser action here and also a lesser action of the adjacent space. Choices aplenty. Do you use that lovely ‘Yellow 6’ to get one honking great action, or do you use it instead to get two different actions, but both working at only ‘3’ value instead?

What do those dice placements get you? Resources, building cards that offer ongoing bonuses, people that offer one-time bonuses and ships that can be prepped to set sail for some trading. Tasty.

• Phase Two: Head down, do lots of different stuff with everything you gained in the previous phase. Build those buildings, spend those resources, play those people, combo those combos, whirr up that engine…

• Phase Three: Built any ships already? Get them sailing on the ‘voyage board’. The further forward you sail them, the greater the reward might be - but beware! Each area of the voyage board sees a pirate card drawn with a varying strength. Are you strong enough to repel them and continue, or have they caused you to retreat slowly back to shore with your tail between your legs and a damaged ship to boot?

Do all of that ten times, see your engine build up splendidly and then tot up your final scores. Points from any cards you gained, points from those ships that sailed and successfully defeated pirates, points from any other combos here and there. Heck, you might have also upgraded your player board along the way and gained points for doing so.

Interestingly, there's no VP track in sight (grab VP tokens during the game instead), so the winner is going to be a surprise until the very end.

Let's just hope it's you!

Solo Headlines:

Decent solo mode here (albeit with a few grumbles about the rulebook and some guesswork needed here and there - more on that later though). You're playing against a point-scoring Automa but, thankfully, not a huge amount of rules overhead given that the game already has quite a few moving parts and upkeep. Pretty simple stuff.

The Automa has its own board made up of four tracks (one for each of the game's four dice colours). During the dice drafting phase, flip a card from its deck. It takes the displayed dice (e.g. the purple die with the highest pip count, the blue die with the lowest pip count etc.), places them on the main board in the location displayed on the reverse of its card and then moves a marker up the equivalent-coloured tracks on its Automa board, gaining ‘stuff’ and swelling and growing ever more as it does. Perhaps it will gain some VP, perhaps it will snaffle up some cards, perhaps it will build some ships ready to set sail, gain a colonist or three. You get the idea.

I like the game-within-a-game here. The "I don't really need or want to take a Yellow die right now but, if I leave it, then the Automa might take it and it's just the colour it needs to do X, Y and Z. Aaaarrrgh" moments. Nice.

The Automa then largely stays out of the way, letting you play the rest of the round and build your own empire using the swag you gained during the dice phase. No managing its resources, no mimicking the human player, no running its own game. It just sits there quietly with some arbitrary stuff that it gained in that dice phase.

Then, during the final Voyage phase, if it can set any ships-a-sailing with you, then it will - competing in the same push-your-luck battle with the pirates for some points for its troubles. At the end of the game, score it some more points for those arbitrary cards and bits and bobs it hoovered up a throughout… and just hope that it doesn't have more points than you.

I do scratch my head a little that the rulebook doesn't seem to offer adjustable difficulty levels for the solo mode at all. Just one way or the highway. Perhaps there is method in that madness - an assumption that all players will eventually learn to ‘get good’ - but it struck me as a potential oversight.

As I understand it, the solo deck can also be used in a multiplayer game to replicate an additional player and make the main board a little more tense and competitive. The rules don't explicitly state this (along with a few other things), but my rummage around the BGG forums enlightened me. As I barely play multiplayer at all, I'll leave this revelation to those who find it more useful!

General Headlines:

There is a good game here.

In fact, there were moments while playing where I thought there might well be a very good game here. The dice placement puzzle is excellent, with both the colour and value of the dice creating delicious decisions throughout the game. Indeed, that first half of each round - drafting and placing out dice - is elegant, smooth, interesting and quite unique (splitting die pips is always a nice addition, I find - I liked it in Woodcraft and I like it here). The dice placement board also changes considerably each game, adding a good amount of variability - not necessarily in what happens over the course of a game, but more importantly, how you get there.

The frustration, however, is that the further I moved away from that initial drafting and dice placement phase, the rougher things became.

Don't get me wrong - there was still a lot to enjoy. The push-your-luck ship voyages add great and quite refreshing tension (fans of Port Royal will be in familiar territory here), the engine building swells brilliantly, and there are constant little dilemmas around whether to invest in ships, crew, buildings or resources. There always seemed to be something interesting to chew over.

But while the first ‘dice phase feels quite structured and organised, the second "do anything you want or can" phase not only felt a little like the guard rails were off perhaps too much, but there also felt to be quite a lot of upkeep throughout - little bits of fiddle that, on their own, didn't feel too onerous, but collectively started to add up a little and bring about some fatigue.

The rulebook didn't help matters. I'm not usually one for slating a rulebook during a review - it's often subjective and, indeed, this wasn't the most egregious example by a long stretch. However, I do think the rulebook could have done with a lot more attention. It's telling that it was only after my fifth game that I felt I had "got the rules down" - and even then I now see on the BGG forums that I was still playing a major rule incorrectly (largely due to me having to guess what the rule was in the first place). Sure, with heavier games I anticipate needing two or three run-throughs to understand the minutiae of how a game plays. Here though, I felt that the rulebook was consistently making me ‘work’ just to find out how to play the game correctly.

None of those things completely ruined the game, but they did frequently get in the way of what was otherwise an enjoyable experience - and I wonder whether they also contributed to my general sense that the game is one round too long. In the fifth and final round, I was willing the game to finish (indeed taking suboptimal turns in order to bring it to a close). The fourth round? Still fully engaged and merrily setting sail.

What keeps me positive, though, is that most of those grumbles feel fixable. The core mechanisms are strong. The decisions are meaningful. The solo mode is enjoyable and the ship voyages create some lovely moments of tension. This is a game that I am glad I played, but also a game that left me wishing a little more polish had been applied around the edges. Had that happened, I suspect we'd be talking about something genuinely excellent rather than simply "quite good".

At a Glance:

The Great Harbor threatened to become a favourite. The dice drafting / placement puzzle is clever, the push your luck ship voyages create some wonderful moments of tension and there are meaningful decisions lurking around almost every corner. The solo mode is a pleasant surprise too, adding competition without adding much upkeep. Unfortunately, a fiddly second half, a frustrating rulebook and a sense that the game runs one round too long stopped me falling completely in love with it. There is a good game here. In fact, there were moments where I thought there might be an excellent one. A little more (or perhaps less?) polish and I suspect we'd be having a very different conversation.