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...
In many of the previous Train of Thought articles, I’ve made comparisons as to how Snowdonia and its mechanics fit into the wider canon of board games. Today’s topic however, I’m slightly more stumped to find an easy analogy for. Eurogames generally follow a formula: Take an action to get something Take a different action to leverage the something you have into points. The surveyor (G) action defies this formula by simply giving you points. The rate of return is lacking and generally speaking is not as exciting as laying track or making buildings. Many games of Snowdonia go by in which the surveyor remains at the start of the track until the end of the game, untouched since...
