![]() Sometimes your grand get-rich vision is a mirage, because you failed to see the right opportunities. It models the single-minded obsessiveness of 19th century America, where everyone was fixated on trying to speculate on a market and get rich (at least that’s how I read it). In previous iterations of this design, the game was all about trying to see what the possibilities of the frontier were. For your opponents, they will have to use up movement points crossing your buildings, sometimes paying small tax for you, you get to add more powerful actions to your personal sequence and benefit from said taxes. Along the way, you add more actions to the sequence in the form of buildings, which allows you and other players to operate more or less efficiently. There’s a map with a series of action spaces, and you travel along taking actions in a sequence, hoping that the sequence is efficient enough to win you the game. There are some other smaller mechanical tweaks that won’t interest anyone but diehard GWT-heads, so I’ll leave them out, and explain what this game does that I found so frustrating.įor those unfamiliar with the series, I’ve described it as an action queue building game. That’s the vast majority of the differences between this game and the original. Here, it is a boat track, but you build little warehouses and move a little boat around instead. įinally, this game features a mechanical throwback to the first expansion to Great Western Trail, Rails to the North, where the singular train track of the series becomes a series of tracks with different routes that lead to different bonuses. ![]() An alternative to the rail-based tracks of previous iterations of the system. There are also special wool delivery locations that function the same as the delivery locations in this game and other games in the series. This allows you to cycle your deck a little more, and infuses you with more cash. The game features a new type of delivery, sheep shearing, where you can turn in cards for money at specific buildings on the map. At the end of my first game, my deck had a whopping 7 objective cards and 5 of the special cards that you get for doing various actions. There are rewards on the board that grant you more mandatory cards, which result in a larger deck. This version of the game leans much harder into the deckbuilding, meaning you’re going to be building larger decks and attempting to cycle them more: bog standard deckbuilder stuff. That pleasure and capriciousness is mostly absent in NZ. Often you wanted to focus on grinding out points with a suboptimal deck because winnowing uses up precious resources. In the two previous iterations of this design, optimizing and whittling your deck to a well-oiled piece of money generating machinery was one of the pleasures of the game, precisely because it was sometimes a trap. I’ve never much enjoyed managing probability engines in card form. Great Western Trail is one of the few game systems where I find deckbuilding to be a tolerable mechanism. I’m going to assume some familiarity with the system, but I’ll hit a few overview points as I go. You’re also in New Zealand, if that’s your bag. Where I found the previous entry in the trilogy of games, Argentina, to be an interesting iteration on the system that improves and adds more depth while still maintaining the competitive edge of the original game, NZ opts to simultaneously make the game more mechanically complex and opaque. Where I want this version of the game to stay, mostly. It’s a bricolage, in the most derivative sense. It is an assemblage of Great Western Trail parts. This is unfortunately not the case with Great Western Trail: New Zealand (NZ). One of the great pleasures of the hobby is finding something that does this. Part of what makes games is that like many art forms, novel and creative ideas built from brute mechanisms become more than the sum of their parts. Basically, my job here is to say what a thing does and whether you should buy it. ![]() It is unfortunate when I find myself writing an overview or a buyer’s guide.
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