Scenarios in board games have been around for quite some time and seem to only be rising in popularity. They take the core mechanics of a game and tweak or rearrange elements around them to create a new experience. Even if not by name, many expansions to early hobby giants Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne function more like scenarios than expansions. More recently, war and adventure games employ this often: Gloomhaven, Memoir 44 and Arkham Horror: The Card Game are all famous recent examples. Snowdonia too has a plethora of scenarios representing different railways around the world. That element is something we want to champion in Grand Tour, in which the scenarios are more ambitious than...
Last time, we talked about Snowdonia's nature as a deeply tactical game, and how it shares that trait with recent hit game Arcs. We dug further into how to better embrace their shared tactical core. We also firmly countered the under-informed allegations by first time players that these games are "too chaotic". Today we’ll examine more of the similar systems in these games, how interactivity drives them and how you can take advantage of that. As a quick clarifier, the below is written primarily with the base games for both titles in mind and not their respective scenario/campaign modes. Where do we start? Interactivity. Both of these games fly strongly in the face of other games in their genre because...
Boom. That’s the article. Mic drop… You can’t come in with clickbait like that and not justify it! Alright, fair enough. I’ve keenly followed the discourse around Cole Wehrle's space opera Arcs over the past few months, observing who loves it, who hates it and why. The more I’ve researched it both through reading and playing, the more something has struck me: the core of the commentary on some of Arcs’s most contentious elements are almost all true of Snowdonia too! Today I’d like to dig into that similarity. We’ll also continue the work of making you a better Snowdonia player, naturally. How is a game about running a star empire remotely the same as a game about building...
Snowdonia is a game set in Wales, which is part of Britain, so it only seems appropriate that the nation’s favourite topic of small-talk – the weather – should make an appearance here. Weather is a harder mechanic to find in board games than some of Snowdonia’s other features. Many racing games such as Heat, Formula D and Rallyman feature weather as a feature of setup that changes the nature of the track. In K2, the weather will change and make certain parts of the mountain more dangerous to climb, and players may have to change their route to avoid the consequences. In Vinhos, the weather each year affects wine quality, informing how players should act. Like in K2 and Vinhos, Snowdonia’s weather...
Despite there being many many games about building railways, trains themselves are often a slightly background feature to the network of travel on the board. In Ticket to Ride, the coloured train cards are an abstracted resource required to connect 2 destinations. In Railways of the World, trains function more like a technology, representing how advanced the trains on your network are and thus how many links they can deliver goods across. In Snowdonia though, trains are more specific and unique. Rather than being representative of a network of locomotives, they are a single train your company uses to assist in the construction of the railway. This gives them room for more individual personality and so mechanically, they represent...
