Caper: Europe Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Caper: Europe, a two player card game published by Keymaster Games. In Caper: Europe, you are traveling around Europe trying to steal the best things.

This is a guest post from Austin Palmer.
I love to travel, and my favorite activity when I visit a city is to steal everything I can lay my hands on. Glittering jewels, priceless paintings, those little shampoo bottles you get at hotels—if it fits in my luggage, it’s coming home with me. Unfortunately, with the cost of travel going up, and those wanted posters circulating the European continent, I don’t get to indulge as much as I would like.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw Caper: Europe at my local store—a game all about traveling to exotic locales and burgling them senseless. How could I resist?

Caper: Europe is a drafting game for two players, and takes about 30 minutes to play.

Caper takes place over six rounds. At the start of each round, both players are dealt a hand of cards. Then players take turns playing a single card from their hand, after which they exchange hands with each other and continue playing.

In odd-numbered rounds, players will play Thief cards to gain Coins, and in even-numbered rounds, they will spend those Coins to equip Gear cards onto their Thieves. These cards have a variety of effects besides their Coin value (or cost), and most of those effects make progress in one of the game’s three scoring areas:

After six rounds, players tally up the points earned from these areas, and the player with the most points wins.

Caper does an excellent job of ratcheting up tension. Your first turns are probing, almost exploratory, but the decision space quickly cramps down to a series of agonizing compromises. You want to control locations, but