Pampero is a hand-management, card-driven action-selection game from Julián Pombo (Mercado de Lisboa) and APE Games, where 1-4 players take on the roles of power companies seeking to earn the most money by improving power distribution in Uruguay. APE Games is crowdfunding Pampero on Kickstarter (KS link) through early November 2022 and it is targeted to deliver to backers in October 2023.
Just ahead of Gen Con 2022, Julián walked me through a few turns of Pampero on Tabletopia, then I had the opportunity to play a few in-person games since the publisher sent me a prototype of Pampero to check out. Knowing Julián’s track record from his development work on Vital Lacerda games (i.e. Lisboa, CO₂: Second Chance, On Mars), and after my initial glance at the big, busy-looking game board and all of the iconography, I was equally intimidated and curious to play Pampero. Thankfully, Julián not only has a knack for designing and developing games, but he’s also a great teacher. As he explained the game, everything felt much simpler than it had appeared initially, and that is also thanks to the beautiful art and excellent iconography from Ian O’Toole.
Most of the game board for Pampero shows a map of Uruguay divided into six sectors which are classified into zones: A for rural, B for industrial and resort, and C for urban. Each sector has construction sites for players to build either wind farms or electrical towers, and there are some construction sites suitable for either. There are also several spaces allocated for a variety of contracts which players need to fulfill throughout the game in order to increase their income.
Each player has their own large power grid and income (PG&I) board, as well as an action planning board, a set of 8 starting action cards, and a bunch of wooden components (bulldozers, wind farms, electrical towers, transformers, income markers, etc.). As you can see from the photo below, this game is a beautiful table hog.
Game setup for 4 players (prototype components)
Pampero is played over a variable number of years and each year begins with an action phase, followed by a consolidation phase. Depending on where players are positioned on the time track, there may also be a scoring phase at the tail end of the year where you’ll earn some much needed income. There are three scoring phases which are triggered throughout the game, and the game ends after the third and final scoring phase. At that point, whoever has the most money wins the game.
In the action phase, each player performs three actions, one at a time, in turn order. On your turn, you place an action marker on the next available number (1, 2, 3) of your action board to mark the current action round, then you can either play an action card from your hand, retrieve all of your cards, or pass and take a battery.
In most cases, you’ll play an action card on your turn. You start the game with a hand of 8 starting action cards which include actions such as building windmill farms or electrical towers, and fulfilling different types of contracts. When playing an action card, you play it to the leftmost open space on either the top or bottom of your action board, pay the action cost for the corresponding zone, and then you resolve the card effect. When you’re placing a card, the spaces on the card slots have one or two associated zones, so you’ll shift your card either left or right so that only one zone is visible, which indicates the cost you pay for the action and which zone you’re allowed to affect.
Action Planning Board w/ 4 action cards (prototype components)
Each action card has iconography associated with one or more actions that you may perform when playing the corresponding card. I’ll highlight some of the main actions to give you a better feel for the kind of things you’ll be doing when you play Pampero.
Starting wind farms, bulldozers, and electrical towers (prototype components)As an action, you can build one of your wind farms on a sector that has an empty wind farm construction site with a bulldozer on it. If the bulldozer is yours, you pay the action cost to the bank, however, if the bulldozer belongs to an opponent, you pay them the cost of the action. As I mentioned previously, the cost of the action depends on where you place the card on your action board and which zone you’re building in. After you pay for the action, you advance your energy marker a number of spaces based on the zone you’re building in. Then whoever owns the bulldozer where you built has to move that bulldozer to an open construction site in the same sector or an adjacent sector. The takeaways here are, it’s awesome that you can use your opponents’ bulldozers because it incentivizes players to strategically place their bulldozers so they can potentially earn money from other players, and building wind farms is one of the main ways to gain energy, which is an important resource in Pampero.
In addition to wind farms, you can also build electrical towers. Similarly, you need an open construction site with anyone’s bulldozer on it in order to build your electrical tower. After paying the cost to the bank or the owner of the bulldozer, you place the leftmost electrical tower from your PG&I board on the selected construction site. Then you get to claim two orthogonally adjacent bonuses from the built electrical tower bonus board, which can be tiles and/or pre-printed spaces. Then, the bulldozer must move to an open construction site in the same sector or an adjacent one.
Electrical tower bonus board (prototype components)
The built electrical tower bonuses vary, but they’re all great and very helpful. Some of them increase different income markers, some give you immediate cash, some are ongoing special abilities, and some of the zone C bonuses give you benefits for end game scoring. Whenever you take bonus tiles, you have to place them on the applicable spaces on your action board. If your action board is ever filled up with bonus tiles for a particular zone, you can no longer take bonus tiles for that zone.
Costly, but juicy contract tiles (prototype components)There are multiple actions that allow you to fulfill a contract since there are multiple types of contracts you can fulfill in Pampero. There are standard, remote, foreign, and solar contracts, and each varies a bit, but for the most part they function the same. To fulfill a contract, the zone you choose must have a sector with both an electrical tower (anyone’s) and an available contract in it matching the contract type on the action card. Additionally, your power grid must be sufficiently developed, meaning you’ve built enough electrical towers that you’ve unlocked the corresponding contract icons (residence, factory, commerce, resort, remote, and solar). Everyone starts with one electrical tower built on the board and has residence, remote, and solar unlocked, but then you have to build more electrical towers to unlock the others so you can fulfill different types of contracts to increase your different income markers that correspond to the icons on the contracts.
Assuming you meet the requirements above, you pay the action cost to the bank if you used your own electrical tower, or to your opponent if you used their electrical tower, and you also need to spend energy as indicated on the game board by the contract you’re fulfilling. Then you increase your income level for the income type(s) matching the contract icon(s). Next you take the contract tile from the board and place it on the control display of your PG&I board in a space occupied by a transformer, and then place that transformer on the game board in the space you took the contract tile from. As your income markers reach certain levels on the income tracks, you can gain specialist action and scoring cards, which are cool and give you some asymmetric play options.
As you place contract tiles on your PG&I board, you have to make a connected network and you cannot place them in a column which you haven’t unlocked from building electrical towers. This is another reason it’s important to stay on top of building your electrical towers. The PG&I control display also has bonuses on some spaces, as well added costs or requirements for connecting certain contracts; it almost feels like its own mini-game. Between this and the bonuses you can unlock on the various income tracks, there are some cool combo opportunities as well.
PG&I board income tracks (prototype components)
Usually you can only fulfill one contract, but there are some linked contracts on the board, and if you meet the requirements, you can potentially fulfill two with a single action. Also, after you place your transformer, if the space is connected to a bonus tile, you can claim it. Since the goal of Pampero is to make the most money, fulfilling contracts to increase your income levels is crucial and it’s one of the most important actions in the game. Of course you have to build out all of the infrastructure to do it, so it’s one of those games where you’ll think — I need to do ABC, but before I can do that I need to take care of XYZ so I can fulfill contract 123 before my opponents.
In addition to building your infrastructure on the board and fulfilling contracts, there are two other main actions in your starting action cards. There’s an action that allows you to move your bulldozers. You can move one of your bulldozers on the board to another construction site anywhere, or move two bulldozers once each within the same sector or adjacent. This action does not interact with the zones, so where you play the action card has nothing to do with where the bulldozers start or end their moves, but you still have to pay the cost, as well as a battery, which is another resource in the game. There are also ways to add new bulldozers to the board from your supply, and anything that allows you to place or move a bulldozer can be instead used to permanently promote one of your bulldozers to the grid in the top left of the game board, where you can gain powerful bonuses at the expenses of losing those bulldozers for the remainder of the game.
Promoted bulldozers (prototype components)
The last main action allows players to take venture capital, or a loan. Instead of paying money to take this action, you gain money based on where you place your action card, plus you get income for one income marker that is in the same tier that you place the Private Investor marker. At the end of the game, you have to pay the private investors back, so each token will subtract $30 from your total. Therefore, it’s usually more optimal to place it on the bottom row of your action board where the costs are more expensive to gain as much money as possible.
Eventually you might gain some specialist action cards and scoring cards as you increase your income levels. The specialist action cards are either better versions or variations of your starting action cards, and there are also a variety of different types of action cards that let you do spicy stuff like copy an action card of an opponent, which is more incentive to increase your income levels as quickly as you can, so you can snag these awesome cards.
Specialist card markets (prototype components)
Instead of playing an action card on your turn, if you have at least two cards on your action board, you can retrieve all of your cards and advance your time track disc one space forward on the time track, or you can pass and take a battery. In either case, you’ll also move your turn order disc to the same number on the bottom of the turn order track. When it’s time to adjust turn order after the consolidation phase, the discs on the bottom track are positioned first and the order is based on who’s furthest along on the time track. So while retrieving all your cards can feel like a painful, but sometimes necessary action, you will at least likely be earlier in turn order for the next year, which is very important in games like this where players are competing to beat each other to particular contracts and bonuses, or optimal construction sites.
After each player has performed three actions, the consolidation phase begins. During the consolidation phase, you first retrieve your action round markers, and then you retrieve a single card from the rightmost space on the top or bottom of your action board. I repeat, only one card. After you take a card back, you’ll (hopefully) produce batteries. To produce batteries, you trace an imaginary line from your energy marker up the PG&I board to the row of electrical towers and you gain batteries for any spaces from your imaginary line and to the left without electrical towers. This is another reason you want to build electrical towers, but also a reason to have energy at the end of the round. Even if you built all of your electrical towers, if you don’t have enough energy, you won’t produce batteries. In Pampero, you need batteries to fulfill high-paying foreign contracts, but you can also use them to pay to build electrical towers instead of paying money, which is helpful when money is tight. Thus, you usually want to set yourself up to produce batteries during each consolidation phase.
After the consolidation phase, you adjust turn order and if all players have reached or passed the first scoring space on the time track, there’s a scoring phase before you start the next year. Similarly, once all players have reached or passed the second scoring space, a second scoring phase occurs. Then after all players have reached the third and final scoring space, the game will end after the final scoring phase.
In the first scoring phase, each player looks at all of the zone A contracts they fulfilled, and for each contract type (residence, factory, commercial, resort), you’ll count the number of icons of that type on contract tokens on your PG&I board and multiply that number by the current income level of the corresponding income markers, and then gain that income from the bank. However, in the second scoring phase, it gets more competitive since you’ll only score (earn income for) a contract that you have the most icons of. There are a set of random scoring tiles placed during setup for the final scoring phase which adds a lot of replay value to Pampero as players will need to adjust their strategies depending on which scoring tiles are in play.
Time track & scoring tiles (prototype components)
After scoring the final scoring tiles, then you’ll score any of the endgame bonuses from built electrical tower bonus tiles you acquired, and pay back your private investors $30 per tile. During any of the scoring phases, if you have any specialist scoring cards you could also discard them to score them to increase your income. In the end, the player with the most money wins the game.
There’s lots to enjoy in Pampero. The theme is so refreshing and well integrated with the game mechanisms. Plus, it’s super cool that Julián created a game about his home country Uruguay, which is a rarely covered board game setting, to my knowledge. I didn’t cover every detail of the game because there’s a lot to it, but at the same time, it’s not too heavy, which is nice since it’ll hopefully be more accessible and appealing to a wider audience.
I can’t speak too much on all of the player counts, because I only played 3 and 4-player games which were both great, although I slightly prefer 3 players, since it’s snappier. However, I think 4 players can be snappier when you play with experienced players.
PG&I board contract network (prototype components)I love all of the player interaction in Pampero. Even though there are plenty of contracts and construction sites to build on, I often felt pressured to get there before someone else beat me to it. You are also paying attention to which contracts your opponents are fulfilling since the second scoring phase you need to have the most of a given contract icon to score it. I also really dig that you can use your opponents’ bulldozers and electrical towers, which is convenient at times, but then you’re essentially giving them victory points, so it’s not always ideal. You can lean into it though, and specifically try to place those pieces so that others want to use them, which is a great way to make some passive income in a game where money is so tight. It gives you a lot to think about when you are building your electrical towers and moving your bulldozers around.
The hand and card management is also really great in this game. Because you only get one of your rightmost cards back at the end of the year during the consolidation phase, you have to carefully plan how and where you play your action cards. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself considering retrieving all of your cards more often that you should. But then you could also consider how the actions get cheaper when playing cards further to the right on your action board, so the longer you go without retrieving all of your cards, the less money you’ll be spending for actions. On the other hand, if you don’t have access to cards you need because they’ve mostly been played, then that becomes another struggle. It’s a real interesting take on the Concordia hand management, action selection mechanism.
Then there’s the whole mini-game of building your network of contracts on your PG&I board and triggering satisfying combos when you place a contract that allows you to bump an income marker, and bumping an income marker hits a spot that lets you bump another income marker, which gets you a specialist card. Those moments feel really good, like you solved part of a complex puzzle.
Lastly, I liked the variable timing of the scoring phases with the time track movement and the replay value added from the variety of final scoring tiles. It’s cool that players can push the game along if they end up retrieving all of their cards more often. It helps the game feel a little different each time you play. Plus, there are also Mercury Rising variants you can mix in to vary things up even further.
If you enjoy unique-themed games with player interaction and tough hand management decisions, and where you get to build stuff and use your opponents stuff, be sure to check out Julián Pombo’s Pampero.
