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 takes place once per game and at the end of the round the number of pieces here equal or exceed the number of players. Until the match takes place, pieces here can’t be used. Players must then decide as a group how many “runs” they want to try and score as a team, 25, 50, 75 or 100 which will determine the difficulty of the match and how many VP it will award.

Once the game has started, players take it in turns based on the order pieces arrived at the match to optionally place cubes into the 6 slots to increase their cricket team’s runs. Iron ore gets 2, Stone gets 4, coal gets 0 and an event will make a worker “out” and unable to add cubes to the cricket match. Any unfilled spaces are then taken randomly from the bag. This process is repeated 5 times or until all workers are “out”. At the end of the cricket match, players score points for each of their pieces that are played.

Strategically, what you should do here is massively variable based on player count and social dynamics and relative player score position. If all players have the same amount of pieces on the pitch, the cricket match is actually irrelevant from a scoring perspective. If they are uneven, then players with more pieces here will want to win while those with fewer will mostly be incentivised to sabotage the match. 

As for choosing which score to aim for, The maximum run score available is 120 (And would require 30 stone be placed). Even if 5 players are acting completely cooperatively in optimal conditions, this is improbable and still leaves a meaningful element of success to chance. Sabotagers should aim for this. Players that want to win should probably aim for 50.

The only piece of advice I would give is that once it looks like the game will trigger, unless there is a major scoring opportunity such as a tunnel available, you should immediately send all your workers there if able to reap the biggest potential reward and have the biggest potential influence on the match. If your opponents commit all their pieces too, you end up neutral and if they don’t, you stand a high chance of scoring a lot of VP over them.

Track

As part of the tunnel trilogy, the Bluebell Line uses tunnel track cards. As I outlined in the Wye Valley Tourer article, these are very very powerful and you cannot afford to ignore them. Once again there are only four tunnels in the scenario, but this time spread into 2 more even groups. This will inform the arc of the scenario, creating two chokepoints where all players will want to have stone in their supply. Consider collecting the stone you need early and simply hoarding it for a while.

Stations

Stations are highly lucrative in this scenario, with above average VP values across the board. Given tunnels are also in this scenario and that stone is the best resource in the cricket match, expect stone to be very highly contested.

There are more stations than usual that need rubble to be constructed. It’s worth bearing this in mind, if you are going to be building a lot of these, that rubble contracts will be less valuable than usual to you. These station spaces alongside the tunnels will make excavation busier than usual also.

East Grinstead Higher and Lower have a new mechanic where one half of it has to be built before the second half can. This is a cute thematic nod to East Grinstead stations’ history but has little meaningful impact on strategy. That said, grabbing the early train here could be very powerful since you could save a steel bar and there’s a few additional sources of coal at Fletching & Sheffield Park and Lewes.

Trains

The trains here include the same Drunken Worker and Conveyor Belt as Wye Valley Tourer. My opinion on these hasn’t changed but it’s worth noting the Conveyor Belt here does make participating in the cricket match harder.

The Quarry train is new here though and offers four different options for resources that nicely compliment the varied offering of this scenario. I would say for 1 steel it’s a good deal. It delivers its value up front also, so you might not be too bothered to see it go come train maintenance.

Contract Cards

Like with the Wye Valley Tourer, you’re mostly better off sticking to the core deck contracts. Contract 28’s tunnel scoring is woefully inefficient vs a standard track contract, 27 and 29 aren’t much to write home about either. Contract 7 however, stands out as a gem here. 8 points for only 2 builds alongside 2-4 free resources is very competitive.

Surveyor

If we briefly ignore the Cricket Match, the surveyor is, once again, not a particularly useful fellow. They’re actually slightly worse than usual, offering only 8 actions for 21 points.

Using the surveyor for the cricket match however does make their journey significantly more worthwhile if they’re able to win there.

Jaya’s Design Thoughts

The cricket match is Snowdonia’s unique brand of cute historical quirkiness at its peak. A fun diversion that celebrates an element of the local area and its history beyond simply the railway itself. I enjoy Snowdonia most when this holistic approach is taken. It adds so much personality to a scenario. In researching this, I learned that there was also originally a ghost that was going to awaken in Sharpthorne tunnel and a bonfire taking place in Lewes! I see why they didn’t fit, the cricket match has a lot going on unto itself. I love the ambition though.

That said, the gameplay side of the cricket match is amongst the most wacky Snowdonia gets which is both good and bad. If played casually, it’s a tremendously fun experience which will raise plenty of laughs and shouts of excitement. Competitively though, it presents a few issues. The inherent randomness in it aside, at 3 or fewer players, it’s a slightly volatile affair that could be triggered in 1 round by a single player ... in higher player count games, if others choose not to send their workers there, you can be stuck with fewer workers for the entire game. A death sentence. Then, as far as I can tell, there’s no tiebreaker to decide the score to aim for. This means  this will sometimes lead to irresolvable impasses.

I personally think one of Snowdonia’s strengths is that it can shine in competitive groups and casual groups equally. So I would try to partially ameliorate the competitive issues by giving players voting power equal to the number of pieces they have on the pitch. This should mean players that want to win the match generally get primary control over the target score without eliminating opportunities to sabotage during the match.

I think on balance I would prefer playing Wye Valley Tourer over Bluebell in most circumstances but that’s only because I’m a more competitive player. I think the cricket match would be a great hook to show newer players that Snowdonia is a game about more than just track building and rails. It’s often about the human stories surrounding them!

How do you feel about the Bluebell Line? What do you think of the Cricket Match? Let me know below!

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Jaya Baldwin