An important part of any great journey is the crossing of the threshold of “home”; those early steps where one is not yet in truly alien territory, but is equally no longer in the comfort of the hearth: Jason and his Argonauts first hitting the open ocean, the hobbits taking their first step out of the shire, the Darling children flying over London with Peter Pan. One would not normally think about such moments in the context of board games, but crafting this emotional beat is exactly the challenge Tony was faced with when making the early scenarios for Snowdonia.

This is in part because scenario-based Eurogames were a fairly alien concept prior to Snowdonia. The closest I could find were the many different expansions to Catan, Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride, but nothing that felt like it had been built from the ground up with scenarios in mind. These early scenarios had to convince longstanding euro players that they weren’t just a petty novelty while also not scaring anyone away. The Daffodil line (fittingly running through Tony’s own home of Newent), faces this challenge marvelously.

Overview and main changes

There are 2 major changes to the formula here: canals and a new resource, the titular daffodils. Canals function almost identically to a normal piece of track but rather than needing to remove rubble from it, rubble must instead be added to it from your own coffers. This is very costly by comparison, but filling in a canal will reward the player that did so with a daffodil – a worthy prize, collected in sets for potentially big points (sets of 1/2/3/4 daffodils being worth 3/9/19/34 points respectively).

Actions

The C action has one new conversion option to smash 1 stone into 2 rubble. If you mismanage your excavation, this will be necessary to afford the required amount to fill in canals. If you collect 3 stone, then smash it all, it equates to 3 rubble per action, which is not spectacular but might be the best you can get here. Note that the C action is likely to be busier than normal: The demand for the space has increased (usually players only need to be here for steel) but the available spaces remain the same.

Excavation does not get a new action card, but is worth discussing here as some of the dynamics around it are significantly altered. The addition of rewards for filling in the last rubble of canals will take the tensions around excavating station spaces and apply them to most of the game. You will need to keep a diligent eye on the excavation rate, turn/action order, other players’ rubble stock and their contracts if you wish to effectively compete for daffodils (each daffodil in a set of 4 is effectively worth 8.5 points, a potentially huge payout). This also increases the relative value of station excavation spaces even further, as now in addition to giving you points they’re also giving you the precious rubble required to fill the canal.

Track cards

All player counts - 4 normal track, 7 canal track

This is another significantly shorter track than usual, but the additional work required to fill in canal track means that the total number of rounds will still be about normal. There will also be an unusually high incentive to excavate early, as rubble becomes sparse once players reach the long canal stint.

Interestingly, there is no change here at different player counts, which means that the number of rounds you’ll play directly scales with player count. It’s minor but worth keeping an eye on if you’ve played it a few times at one player count then switch to another.

Stations

This is our first scenario in this series that has a buildable station space from the very start of the game. This makes stone a more interesting early pick, especially with several juicy payouts (like 5 stone for 12 VP at Skew Bridge). Any excess stone collected can also be smashed into valuable rubble, making it unlikely to be a wasted resource.

Dymock and Over Junction offer players the chance to score daffodils and track respectively, making for potentially high competition areas. Dymock is especially pivotal – there are only 12 daffodils up for grabs in the scenario (barring the 1 per player obtainable via surveyor) and 5 of them are in Dymock. Due to how early in the scenario it’s accessed, it can really inform who the “daffodil players” for the game are going to be.

Gloucester offers players a chance to cash 3 daffodils out for 25 or 20 points. If you definitely can’t make a set of 4 daffodils, then doing this for 25 is pretty good, for 20 however… I think it’s a trap. 3 daffodils cash out for 19 points at the end of the game without having to spend any actions. So spending an action for 1 point (and a placed building marker) will rarely be a worthwhile play.

Surveyor

The surveyor here is quite bad. It’ll take him 7 moves to score you 16 points, which is one of the lowest payouts I’ve seen for the poor chap. There is a use case for moving him as far as Dymock though, where he’ll procure you a daffodil before scoring. If this would be your 4th daffodil, that’s an effective 15 point gain for only 2 actions. That’s actually very good if you find yourself one short of a set near the end of the game.

Contracts

Somewhat unusually, there are no scenario specific contracts here, but the scenario does shift the relative value of some of the core ones. Specifically, the rubble contracts become a very different proposition to normal. By stockpiling rubble to score contracts, you’re not investing it into obtaining daffodils. The value of daffodils is highly variable based on how many you amass, so you’ll have to assess on a game-by-game basis where your rubble is best used.

Contracts offering excavation bonuses as their one-time use ability, however, are even more desirable since they pack even more points-snagging threat than usual. Such effects are usually attached to contracts with track-based scoring criteria, which neatly avoids creating a conflict of interests.

Trains

The official train for this scenario is the Utility Loco. The train is a copycat: each round its owner chooses another train a player has purchased and gains its abilities for that round. This train varies from comically overpowered to overpriced and bland depending on how many other players buy trains and what the abilities on those trains are. At the top end, you’ve bagged yourself a stupidly cheap L.A.D.A.S./Wyddfa/Enid Voltron train. At the bottom, you’re looking at a Moel Siabod or a Snowdon without the extra coal/vp. The potential upsides go far higher than the potential downsides though, since if nobody else buys trains for it to copy, you could be the only player with 3rd worker access. It appears to have been made a promo in the master set.

Jaya’s design thoughts

Introducing a player to their first new scenario can be a pivotal moment. Done well, a player feels as if they’ve just discovered a wealth of potential riches to explore; done poorly, that player might feel the scenarios are a bit of a pointless gimmick not worth the extra rules. I think this scenario sticks the landing excellently in this role by packing a lot of depth into very few rules. Better yet, it’s an excellent teacher of more advanced play techniques around scoring and excavation that will serve players well in any scenario.

The scoring structure on the daffodils makes players engage more explicitly with the variable values of things to different players. A lot of people are maths-resistant or find the idea of assessing an opponent’s scoring situation stressful, but the simplicity of the daffodil scoring opens that up by only asking that a player glances to the side and counts to 4:

1 daffodil (3 points) = bit naff

2 daffodils (9 points) = okay

3 daffodils (19 points) = quite good

4 daffodils (34 points) = jackpot

It’s a lot simpler to see “I want to stop that person getting a 4th daffodil” than it is to meticulously calculate your way through someone’s contracts relative to the board state. But at the heart of it, it’s the same skill.

With excavation timing, the learning comes just through its frequency of occurrence. Often in Snowdonia, meaningful sequencing might come up only once or twice, but be very important when it does. A player getting this wrong realises their mistake, but doesn’t always get a chance to try again until their next game. Here though, players run into timing puzzles the whole way through, so they get to make the mistake but most likely reinforce the learning with an immediate opportunity to try again. 

Musings on learning aside, I want to give a small shoutout to the Utility Loco too. I really enjoy the little pseudo- prisoner’s dilemma it sets up around trains. It champions assessing the board state to see if it’s a contextually correct pick which, for me personally, is Snowdonia at its best.

I’m curious though, what do you think the best scenario is to play with someone after Snowdon? Did you personally feel any of the “a-ha!” moments I described above when you played the daffodil line? Let me know!

If you’d like to receive all the latest Snowdonia: Grand Tour news before anyone else, sign up to the mailing list.

If you’re interested in playtesting Grand Tour and are able to make “print and plays”, you can sign up to our playtest mailing list.