Recent Train of Thoughts have all been about more complex scenarios. With all the excitement of Grand Tour and Special Edition building… I wanted to go back once again to the earlier end of Snowdonia’s scenario catalogue for some reflection. I find the scenarios of Snowdonia’s youth offer very interesting opportunities to compare the game’s origins to its form in the present day. Like turning around on a mountain hike to look down at how far you’ve come, it’s pleasing to play a simpler scenario and think about just how much the game’s design has advanced since then. The early scenario we'll be looking at today is the Britannia Bridge. Menai Straits/Britannia Bridge These two cards are found right at...
Today we come to an end of the “Tunnel Trilogy” of scenarios. The first scenario we explored of this trilogy was the Wye Valley Tourer. It felt like an advanced version of the base game, fleshing out most elements of the game without any one particular element stealing the limelight. The next we looked at was the Bluebell Line, which did the opposite, investing most of its changes into the single cricket match minigame. Our final scenario in this trilogy is the Malta Railway. Malta sits perhaps somewhere between the two, having a lot of the versatility of the former but a very strong identity like the latter. New Actions and Resources This scenario uses the Daffodils previously seen in...
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...
