Saint Malo

Name: Saint Malo
Brand: alea
Rating: 5.97262 (2453 reviews)

Roll five dice, draw your own pirate-threatened port town, and keep soldiers ready for the raids.

Designers: Inka Brand, Markus Brand
Published by: alea
Editions by: Ravensburger

Saint Malo is a dice-rolling city builder where your town lives on a wipe-off board. You roll five dice, then spend the results on resources, characters and buildings, and you draw each one onto your own grid with a marker. Place a storehouse, put a merchant next to it, and the coins start trickling in every turn. Soldiers matter too: pirates raid the coast, and a thin defense can wipe out half your town. Designers at alea rate it two out of ten for difficulty, and it plays like a lighter cousin of Roll Through the Ages with erasable pencil work. Two to five players, around forty-five minutes, and best as a duel.

Draw your city on a wipe-off boardDice combos create buildings and peoplePirate attacks punish thin defenses

Who it's for

You like roll-and-write with real building and placement flavor, and a medium-weight dice game that works nicely with two.

Not for you if…

You want deep strategy or no luck at all. Dice dominate, and the drawing on a board is simple, not a puzzle.

Vibe's take

Light, tactile and a little tinkering. Rolling and re-rolling gives the tension, the marker on the board gives the satisfaction, and every pirate raid is a quiet gamble on how much you defended.