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...
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...
Although it looks very different from its network-building peers, Snowdonia is still, at its core, a game about building a railway. It may for the most part be simplified down into a single line, but there's more going on under the sleepers than initially meets the eye. Let's pull them up and have a look. How do I lay track?Track in Snowdonia is laid using the D action. However, laying track costs steel bars, so you actually have to take at least two other actions first. You need to use the A action to obtain iron ore and then the C action to convert that iron ore into steel bars. The fact that laying track is a slow multi-step...
Gaining various colours of cubes is one of the most iconic images in eurogames. Agricola, Brass, Caylus, Terraforming Mars, Terra Mystica, Lords of Waterdeep… the list of well known eurogames featuring the collecting, moving, spending and exchanging of cubes is vast. Snowdonia is part of this same tradition. On a surface level, Snowdonia’s implementation of cubes may seem simple. Look closer though, and it reveals unspoken depths that, when understood, can really give you an edge. So, let’s reach into the bag and see what secrets lay within. What are the cubes in Snowdonia and what are they for? By default, a game of Snowdonia will contain 5 types of cube:Iron ore – Used to make steel bars which in...
