Santa Maria

About this board game

Santa Maria is a streamlined, medium-complexity Eurogame for 1–4 players, with games lasting about 90 minutes. Released in 2017, it challenges each player to establish and develop a colony through dice drafting and strategic engine building.

Expand your colony by placing polyominoes with buildings on your colony board. Dice represent migrant workers, and each die activates a complete row or column of buildings. Buildings activate in order, from left to right or top to bottom, before the die is placed on the last activated building to block that space. Careful planning is essential: where you place new buildings and when you use each die can shape your entire engine.

As the game progresses, produce resources, form shipping routes, send out conquistadors, and improve your religious power to recruit monks. Every recruited monk presents a meaningful choice:

• Scholars provide permanent special abilities.
• Missionaries deliver an immediate bonus.
• Bishops can contribute possible end-game points.

After three rounds, the player with the most happiness wins. The available specialists, end-game bonuses, and buildings vary from game to game, creating near-endless replayability. Santa Maria is low on luck, offers no direct destructive player conflict, and uses language-independent components, making its strategic colony development the focus of every session.