Overview and main changes Snowdonia is a game about building railways. I’m reminding everyone of this because I’m about to spend most of this article talking about cricket. The Bluebell Line is the next part of the “tunnel trilogy” alongside the Wye Valley Tourer we looked at last time. If you haven’t read that article, I highly recommend reading it before this one. The primary, titular tunnels appear in both. That said, Bluebell has its own quirks in the form of high scoring stations and a cricket match. The cricket match Bluebell’s most standout feature is this sporting event. Players may assign labourers here and their surveyors can also participate if they have reached the card in time. The match...
Most scenarios we’ve looked at in this series are great because they create highly specific challenges for players to overcome. Australia taxes players with water and extreme weather, the Daffodil line inverts the excavation mechanic and Qinghai-Tibet asks them to carefully manage oxygen. Today’s scenario goes in a different direction though. Rather than use a lens that highlights a specific game element, Wye Valley Tourer instead adds nuances to multiple systems. This creates something that feels more like a levelled up version of the base game for more experienced gamers: There’s a new type of track worth a tonne of points Stations offer a much broader range of tactics for building The surveyor goes on a pub crawl in a...
Last time, we looked at the Jungfraubahn, an explosive climb up a mountain in the freezing cold full of exciting opportunities in the Swiss Alps. Today, we are looking at a scenario that’s almost entirely the opposite: A mostly flat railway through the brutally hot Australian outback that will consistently challenge you. Welcome to the Trans-Australian railway. Let’s explore together. Changes - Weather + Water The first big change is the weather. All 8 of the fog contract cards here are replaced with extreme weather. Extreme weather repeats whatever the current weather type is and then triggers either a drought (if the weather is sun) or a flood (if the weather is rain). Both of these interact with the new...
Today we’re looking at the Jungfraubahn, another of the earlier scenarios released very shortly after the Daffodil line we talked about a few months ago. This closeness in release is telling, I think, as both have a similar feel in terms of complexity level and feel like good “first forays” into scenarios. Daffodil achieved this by adding a new resource and playing with the way excavation worked; Jungfraubahn does exactly the same. Impressively though, the gamefeel it achieves is very different. Let’s explore further. Changes – dynamite Jungfraubahn adds dynamite, and as the title might imply, this resource has an explosive impact on the game. When excavating, players can spend dynamite alongside a single point of excavation to take all the...
Last month we looked at the Qinghai-Tibet scenario, one of the most recent scenario designs. It’s popular for its depth, a poster-child for Snowdonia’s potential as a scenario-based game. Before that, we looked at the Daffodil Line, an earlier scenario that’s a fantastic place for those with a few games under their belt to hone some essential skills while whetting their appetite for more. Today though we’re going even earlier, to what was once the only alternative to Mt Snowdon: Blaenau Ffestinog. Coming in at an absolutely flyweight 8 cards, Blaenau is a bit of an experiment. A pioneer for the entire scenario concept. How does it stack up? Overview Blaenau Ffestinog offers a few simple but meaningful changes to...
