Davos is a 2–8 player (with provisos) political wheeling and dealing game, estimated to take about an hour to play, suitable for ages 14 and up (12+ on BoardGameGeek).
The game’s crowdfunding campaign has just launched on Gamefound, but you won’t actually find out much about the game there, sadly! (More on this in the Campaign section below.) For example, the page starts with: ‘Organize an intimate 1-on-1 session, or lead a respectable 8-person summit. Ease into it with the Base Game, make a crony in Team Mode, disrupt in Dissident Mode, or leverage well-earned control in the Big Game.’ Uh, OK. But what the heck does that mean?
I’ve watched the videos and pored over the rulebook, and believe there’s a really good game hiding in there. The ‘base’ game is the simplest variant, so let’s dive into that.
Playing the Base Game
First, the game revolves around these 3 card types:
- Corps represent corporations and other entities with an interest in what happens in Davos; each operates within one class—Big Banking, Big Pharma, Big Energy and Big Tech in the ‘base’ game, with Big Arms, Big Food and Big Media coming into play with the ‘mean’ edition. Players place Asset tokens on deployed Corp cards to indicate their investments.
- Bills determine how Corps generate profits, and are associated with a particular political ideology (left wing, centrist or right wing). Players can assign Assets to the relevant parliamentary wing to vote in favour or against a particular Bill. If a Bill is passed, rewards or punishments (addition or removal of Assets) are dished out to players based on Corps containing their Assets, depending on where they are on the board. In the ‘mean’ edition, Bills have effects even when they don’t pass.
- Goals are the objectives players are trying to maximise in order to win, such as having most Assets within one Bloc, or having most Assets in one Corp of a particular class. Goal cards also have one or more category icons along the bottom—these contribute to players final scores.
Each player starts off with 5 Assets of their colour and one hidden Goal card, but the major part of setup is defining the state of the world: 4 Bills are drawn and one allocated to each of the 4 Blocs (North America, Europe, Global South and China), and an initial Corp is randomly drawn and placed in the corresponding slot for the Bill’s Bloc. For games with fewer than 4 players, Dissident (a sort of automated player intended to run interference and create more tension at low player counts, but also comes under human control in the ‘dissidents’ variant of the game) Assets are added to every Bill and to the Bloc’s matching Party within its Parliament, if that exists—e.g., if a left-leaning Bill is added to China, the initial Corp goes in the lefthand slot at the top of the board and gains a Dissident Asset; however, no Dissident Assets are added to the Chinese Parliament, as that possesses only a central Party.
Finally, two additional Corps are displayed face up (one on the top of the draw deck, and one forming the discard pile), and the same for Goal cards.
The game is played over three rounds (each representing a year), in which players take turns to play one of 4 actions, until all players pass. The first person to pass gains an extra Asset token and will be the first player in the next round. After all but one player has passed, that person takes one more turn for free, but can take more by paying an Asset for each extra.
The actions are:
- Add a new Corp, placing it in any open Corp space; the card can be taken from the visible ones, or the player can draw 2 face down cards, selecting 1 and adding the other to the discard pile; then the player adds one or more of their Assets to the Corp.
- Add further Assets to any played Corp.
- Add Assets to any position in any Parliament.
- Pay 2 Assets to take a Goal card (using the same mechanism as for Corps); the player can optionally discard one of their old Goals.
After everyone has passed, voting on the Bills takes place to determine who gets which rewards. Voting is primarily based on the numbers of Assets in each Bloc’s parliament, but the rules are moderately complex. First, the party (left, centre or right) with the most Assets of any colour has 1.5 votes, other parties with Assets have a single vote, and parties with no Assets have zero influence on the outcome. Next, whoever has most Assets within the party casts the vote as they desire, and ties are resolved via off-the-table negotiation. Dissidents always vote in favour their ideology.
Once voting has taken place and if the bill has passed, profits and losses dished out: the former as additional Assets given to players, and the latter by removing corresponding Asset tokens from Corps on the board; if a Corp ends up with no Assets on it, it’s deemed to have gone bankrupt and is removed from the board. (This seems to indicate that Corps and deployed Assets will tend to get stuck on the board, unless losses have more of an impact than I, perhaps naively, expect.)
The next step in the first and second rounds is to check which Goals have been achieved. Completed goals contribute to your final score, but be aware that they also reduce the amount of additional Assets you receive before the following round. After that, the game state is reset, similar to the how the game is setup initially: the past round’s Bills are replaced with 4 new ones, and Dissident Assets placed accordingly; players add a new Goal card to their collection; they also get 5 more Assets, reduced by the number of completed Goals they have. (Something to remember is that completing a Goal in one round doesn’t mean that it’ll still be valid in the next—you might have most Assets in Europe at the end of the first year, but someone else could take the crown in the next—so there’s an interesting trade-off between taking the prize early vs having extra Assets later.)
I haven’t fathomed why yet, but Goals are not checked at the end of the third round. Instead, after Bills are processed, players spend their last Assets (‘on anything we want,’ the rulebook says, whatever that translates to) and calculate their final score. Completed Goals score one point, while incomplete ones take a point away (and since everyone gains a Goal card at the beginning of this round, but won’t be able to check its completion, all players will have a point deducted). You also gain a point for each unique category icon on completed Goals. Ties are broken by whoever has most Assets on the board.
Variants
In the ‘mean’ game, Big Arms, Big Food and Big Media are added as additional Corp types, and some Bills have an effect whether they’re passed or rejected.
If you want to add yet more complexity, the ‘big’ game variant lets you re-score already completed Goals, as well as use newly introduced Control Cards for additional in-game actions, such as moving deployed Assets from one spot on the board to another. This variant also includes Speciality cards, similar to Goals, but providing Assets rather than points.
It seems that ‘base’ is where players are expected to start, and when they want more from the game, they can add in the ‘mean’ and/or ‘big’ mechanisms.
Players work in pairs in the ‘teams’ mode, sharing profits but not Assets.
The ‘dissidents’ variant lets a player take control of the Dissident Assets. That player doesn’t gain Goal cards, but instead takes all those not completed by other players at the end of the game and scores those.
Campaign
The Davos Gamefound page is not a great page currently, which is a tremendous shame. It talks ‘around’ the game without actually saying what it is; you’ll have to watch some of the videos on the page to work out what the game’s all about, or you can find the rulebook link hidden within one of the updates.
Frankly, this is a very poor campaign page for what looks like a great game, and I fear could lead to the project failing. If it wasn’t for the fact I’d come across the game elsewhere and was already engaged, I’d have bypassed the campaign altogether.
That being said, as far as rewards go, Davos must be pretty much complete since shipping is estimated for November 2026, which is presumably why there is little in the way of stretch goals. The April pre-campaign update stated that the games have been manufactured and were awaiting transport, so nothing’s going to change now—I do wonder what’s been happening with those boxes since then, especially since that same update talked about deliveries starting in July!
Besides the game box, you can splurge on additional card packs, which are still in development, and some of which might be crowdfunding exclusives (in one case, dependent on numbers of Gamefound followers, so I guess counts as a stretch goal; based on the number on the first day of the campaign, there might not be too many cards in that pack). You can also get game cards printed with your own mugshot on them, which sounds awful to me (though you can substitute any picture you want—I wonder if my cats would like to found a Kitty Corp). Oddly, translations from English cost extra too.
Verdict
The game itself seems to be solidly constructed, though the art on the cards is rather bland AI-generated guff (and as you’d imagine, the campaign comments include ‘discussions’ about the merits or otherwise of AI —if it’s a turn-off, just walk away from the game). The cards have QR codes on the back, presumably intended to explain more about the cards, but wherever they’re intended to point to doesn’t seem to exist yet—but no matter, they have no effect on gameplay. The rulebook is clear, and includes helpful example sections and descriptions of a few potential strategies.
One thing that’s possibly missing is a solo mode, but the game’s designer, Martijn Snelder, mentioned in a campaign comment that there ‘may’ be one in the future.
I feel it shares a similar space to World Order, but is much lighter-weight and probably much less stressful to think about in terms of parallels with the real world.
Overall, I think this is a game worth getting, but as the rewards section indicates that there’s a retail pledge (also with estimated shipping in November), I’m currently leaning towards waiting for retail, since the exclusives don’t do a lot for me—it’s tricky to know how much actual gameplay the additional cards bring. On the other hand, I might end up changing my mind, to add my support to the campaign.
About the author
Current favourite boardgames are Ark Nova and Spooktacular, with a side of Dune: Imperium - Uprising and Paleo. When not playing games or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside over 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). In any time left over after all that, L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
