Board Game Arena

Welcome to Venice! We are proud to introduce today Ponte del Diavolo, a strategy game for 2 players from Martin Ebel published by Hans im Glück.

Ponte del Diavolo is a very simple to learn placement game. Your goal is to build groups of islands using tiles and bridges.

On your turn, you must place either 2 tiles OR a bridge. You can place tiles anywhere, with the following constraints:
_ 4 connected tiles of your color form an "island" (1, 2, or 3 are only "sandbanks" and worth zero point, sorry!)
_ you can NEVER build an island with more than 4 tiles
_ islands of the same color can NEVER touch one another, even diagonally
_ you can build a bridge to connect 2 of you islands or sandbanks separated by 1 free water square
_ a bridge cannot be built over tiles (And guess what? Tiles cannot be built under bridges either :p).

When the game ends, you score points for each group of islands connected by bridges:
_ isolated island: 1 point
_ group of 2 islands: 3 points
_ group of 3 islands: 6 points
_ group of 4 islands: 10 points
_ group of 5 islands: 15 points
_ group of 6 islands: 21 points
_ group of 7 islands: 28 points
_ group of 8 islands: 36 points

And that's it!

Ponte del Diavolo, like many other strategy abstracts on BGA, is very easy to understand but hard to master. It's also a very fast game, so we really advise you to give it a try it if you like this category of games!

The Ponte del Diavolo adaptation for BGA has been developed by Andrew Collier using BGA Studio. Andrew did a really nice looking adaptation with 3D bridges to allow the community to enjoy this wonderful game. Thanks a lot for this Andrew!

BGA would also like to thank the publisher Hans im Glück for their authorization to host this game online on BGA.

Enjoy!

Nice Many players consider the 12x12 as the best version. More balanced.

Daggerheart wrote:Many players consider the 12x12 as the best version.

The good news is that it is available as an option

Another great little 2p abstract here Thank you!

I played it years ago and when refreshing the rule by your post above, I was misled by "separated by 1 free water square" - like the bridge can be set only "straight" but that's not true, as I remember and see - both in the rulebook and the games in progress. But it can be a bit misleading.

Great I've never played this and I know it's abstract, but I like Venice-themed games

The game end scoring table in the rules has incorrect values towards the end. The values should be ... 28, 36, 45, 55. And with the 12x12 version larger scoring connected groups are possible, so continuing would be ... 66, 78.

The intro states "islands of the same color can NEVER touch one another, even diagonally".
However it is crucial to know that islands are also not allowed to touch sandbanks
(whereas sandbanks are allowed to touch each other diagonally).

This is critically important because it means as soon as you finish an island you are guaranteeing that one water space around it will remain available for your opponent to place tiles on, except wherever you manage to build bridges.

Zugzwang wrote:The game end scoring table in the rules has incorrect values towards the end

Thanks, I've corrected the table in the rules. (The code doesn't have this problem, it calculates triangular numbers directly as n*(n+1)/2 rather than looking them up in a table).

This is AWESOME!! Thank you so much, BGA! I was a board game distributor, and I used to sell this game! One of the best two-player games ever!

Can two bridges touch the same square?