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 is an ever-changing but forecasted presence. (The forecasters in these games get it right every time too! Board games truly let us live out our wildest fantasies.) Now though, we must get our head out of the clouds and make hay while the sun shines.
Are these weather gags going to be a consistent feature?
Honey, you’ve got a big storm coming.
Oh good. Well go on then, how does the weather in Snowdonia work?
There are three primary types of weather in Snowdonia: sun, rain and fog. The weather for the current turn and subsequent 2 turns are always visible on the weather track. At the end of each round the weather changes: The current weather token is removed, the ones below move up and a new token is placed in the now empty 3rd position based on the symbol showing on the top of the contract deck.
When the weather changes, usually so do the work rates. Sun will increase the excavation rate by 2 and the track laying rate by 1, while rain will reduce them both by 1. Fog works differently and will instead block some or all of the worker spaces for excavation and track laying for the round. How obstructive fog is depends on whether you play with the base rule or the popular thinner fog variant.
Mechanically, that’s all there is to it. It’s a breeze!
I’m not going to reward this behaviour.
Let me enjoy my moment in the sun.
So how should I play around the weather?
Good question. At a very basic level, laying track and excavating is more efficient while the work rates are high, while other actions are unaffected. So you should excavate or lay track while it’s sunny and try to gain resources, build, take contracts and move your surveyor when it’s not.
Naturally though, the same will be true for all your opponents. There won’t be enough space to go round for you all to play like that. So you’ll have to look for opportunities they might not have spotted. For example, sometimes the timing on a weaker excavation move can still line up so you still score the bonus from a station, mitigating the reduced rubble gain and making progress despite the rain. Equally, if other players are outcompeting you for those spaces in the sun, you can go saving up resources for a rainy day: building is expensive, and having a stockpile means that as other players run out of resources and have to go to collect more, you can monopolise the build action and take all the scoring opportunities.
Trains are another way you can change your relative standing with the weather. The No.1 L.A.D.A.S and the No.7 Ralph increase your excavation and track laying rates respectively. This means that in rainy circumstances, you can be operating like it’s sunny with minimal competition from your opponents.
In fog, the number of available worker spots are reduced. This increases the relative value of the first player marker due to a lower number of useful worker spaces. You’ll probably also want to hold off on using your coal as your 3rd worker is less likely to have space for a productive action.
If you can consistently find the gaps off the beaten track that other players aren’t using then you’ll be able to succeed come rain or shine.
This is getting silly now. Are there any other parts of the game affected by weather I should look out for?
The other thing to keep an eye on with the weather is events. Events excavate entire spaces based on the work rate. If it excavates 4 spaces at once, that’s often 15–20% of the total available rubble and multiple station excavation bonuses gone. It also, however, opens up a lot of new building opportunities all at once. If you can see these big events coming, you can plan accordingly and get an edge. New players to Snowdonia are often caught off guard by such moments and can feel as if it was overly chaotic or unpredictable. But as established in my article about the cube bag, the likelihood of events occurring is more predictable than first meets the eye.
And on that note, so is the weather. This is the aspect of contract cards I didn’t cover in my article on those. By being tied to the backs of the contract cards, the weather is not determined on a random 1/3rd chance each turn. In the default contract deck, there are 11 cards with sun on them, 13 with rain on them and only 6 with fog. That’s some information to work from already, but once you’re a few rounds into the game, you might be able to narrow it down further. If your game so far has been 5 rounds of sun and 2 rounds of fog, the chances of rain have risen from 13/30 (43.3%) to 13/23 (56.5%) While the odds the sun continues have dropped to 26%. Again, I’m not expecting anyone to get a calculator out in the middle of a game, but this can help you to think about the shape the game could take even beyond the 2 turns of explicitly forecasted weather.
This is in the realms of quite niche and technical improvements to your play, but Snowdonia can be a capricious game. If there’s a high event density and a high chance of sunshine, then get ready for the game to make those big shifts! Play right and an event raining on the other players’ parades can have you on cloud nine.
I’m going to leave if you keep this up.
Or you could throw caution to the wind and join me?
You’re on thin ice.
That’s the spirit!
Just tell me if the weather is up to anything interesting in Grand Tour please!
Of course it is.
In the Uganda Line there is an extra space to the end of the work rate tracks, allowing the excavation rate to reach 5… as long as you can pay the water costs to bear the extreme heat.
Meanwhile, the Florida Overseas Railroad goes in the opposite direction. At the bottom of the work rate tracks is an additional space: a tropical storm. Every time rain causes the work rates to hit the storm, all players will lose their trains unless they pay steel (or temporarily lose a worker). The work rate then slides back up one., which means that if it’s raining cats and dogs you could have to contend with it for multiple rounds in a row!
Fun fact: in Welsh, the phrase for "raining cats and dogs" is "mae hi'n bwrw hen wragedd a ffyn" which translates as "it’s raining old ladies and sticks".
You’re exhausting. At least the article is over now.
See! Every cloud has a silver lining.
…I’m leaving.
Well, my fair-weather friend there stormed off with a face like thunder. But since you’re still here reader, this hopefully demonstrates some of the nuances around weather, how you can adapt your play to it and stop events from putting a dampener on your plans!
How do you usually play around the weather in Snowdonia? Do you play with regular fog or the thinner fog variant? What’s your favourite weather-related idiom? Let me know in the comments!
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Jaya Baldwin
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