In the year 1800, things are really going to be different. There will be plenty of opportunities to expand our small island nation, build the industry our population desires, even explore worlds both old and new. What an exciting time to be alive! Should we consider celebrating all of this with a festival? Sure, sure, after we’ve plied ourselves to the brink of exhaustion. This land is ripe for a new beginning, filled with rigorous hard work and recognition. And perhaps a little beer or schnapps during a break. Anno 1800 is a game for 2 to 4 players by Martin Wallace and is based on the acclaimed UbiSoft video-game with the same name. The objective of the game is to score the most points while getting rid of all your population cards by satisfying their needs, triggering the end game. To achieve it, you will develop your island through expansion, trade, exploration, and social ascension. When a player plays the last population card from their hand, the game end is triggered, and players finish the current turn and play a last one before final scoring. Players score points for every card played (ranging from 3 to 8 points based on its type), for every objective fulfilled in their expedition cards, for their gold reserves, for the five common objective cards present in the game and 7 bonus points for the player who first played all her cards. Everybody To The Factories

I have enjoyed my plays of this so far, and I can definitely see the appeal that this will have for those who like longer and more complex games. It will also appeal to those who have like civ-building games as it has a similar feel. For me, I loved the first hour or so, but then as the game ground on, it moved down into the “I like it” territory as I felt it went on a bit longer than I would have liked. Again, this may be more my personal preference towards games under two hours as the pacing of the game seems to work fine for what it wants to do. I’d definitely still play it again if asked. Anno 1800 started out life as a computer game by Ubisoft. Here it’s received the wood-and-cardboard treatment by respected designer Martin Wallace and Kosmos Games. In Anno 1800, 2-4 players compete in a world of trade, discovery and exploration. Who will keep their population the happiest? Wallace says the expansion has also been designed to respond to some criticisms made of Anno 1800, including the limited use of certain resources. An additional set of cards included in the expansion, which sit as a pool on the table rather than in players’ hands, grant you additional actions in return for mid-level resources that previously had little utility. Instead, you can Explore the New World. These are the smaller (3×1) rectangular tiles. These sit above your Island board. You also pay for these by spending increasing amounts of Explore Tokens. On each New World tile there are three of five New World resources, such as sugar cane, cocoa, and so on. This represents you having a amiable relationship with citizens from the New World. On later turns, you can spend Trade Tokens to gain access to these resources. The difference here is that rival players cannot spend their Trade Tokens to lean on your relationship with these citizens. They have to do some exploring of their own to get their hands on such exotic resources…

About Dale Yu

Adapted from the city-building videogame series of the same name, Anno 1800 is an economic management game that challenges you to develop an industrial base, accrue resources, and trade with fellow players to accelerate your growth. The English-language version is currently scheduled to release in August this year. You can also ‘explore’ and extend your own island, or discover the new world. To explore, you’ll need ships. So you can build shipyards, and ships, too! As well as trying to complete your own Population Cards, you’ll be competing with your opponents for communal end-game goal cards. There’s a lot of these that come with the game, so you’ll get a modular feel, every time.

There’s no getting around it, however the setup is a bear. Enough of a bear that there have already been times when preparing this review where I looked at the box and had to ask myself if I wanted to set it up by myself. That’s important when games are fighting the mental hurdle for table time; some games give me the punch of a fun experience without the headache of a difficult setup/teardown. Anno 1800 has a lot of great ideas at play, but before I get to those, I want to discuss some of the shortcomings I had during play. Not to bury the lede, I do think those who enjoy strategic euro-style games will find a lot to enjoy here. But it’s not without its faults. See that bottom row of your Island? The water? You start the game with a modest fleet of three ships. Each player takes two Trade Tokens, one to place on their first two ships. Plus, you get one Exploration Token, to sit on your third ship. The Tokens match the symbol on the ship. Above that, on the shoreline, you have one ‘Strength 1’ Shipyard. Inland, you all have the same 10 default Buildings, which are goods production spaces. The list of industries? You almost can’t make it up. Shirts. Toilet paper. Gold. Sausage. Steel. Beer. Bicycles. Soap. The list of industries includes the things you would expect in a game from the designer of Age of Industry, plus a lot more. The main mechanism during players’ actions of Anno 1800 is placing your workers in your factories to produce the goods you need either to build a new factory or to play one of your population cards and claim its rewards. You have five different types of workers: Farmers, Workers, Artisans, Engineers, and Investors, each being needed to produce different goods. They are associated with different population cards, being Farmers and Works the basic one, Artisans, Engineers and Investors the advanced one, and New World cards lie somewhere in between them. Being efficient in worker allocation is key in the game, as well as finding the balance between getting new workers and upgrading them. While new workers increase the number of actions you can take before needing to reset your board, they come along with population cards, getting you further from the end-game condition (or even giving you negative points depending on the objectives that are in play), upgrading your workers don’t give you new cards, just letting you redistribute your workforce as your nation progress.That being said I sort of feel as if I owe it an in-person play, but that’s kind of silly and I may well decide not to bother. Some Population Cards offer a ‘reward’ of letting you discard other Population Cards from your hand. This might seem odd, considering you want to complete cards for points, right? But if Pyrphorian is in play, throwing away hard-to-complete cards can be crucial! Plus, it speeds up the game and might land you that Fireworks Token. If Pyrphorian is one of the five Objective Cards, you might tweak your strategy so you don’t intentionally increase your workforce. Because every new citizen brings with them a new Population Card you need to complete… The core game plays exactly the same way,” Wallace says about the add-on. “So it’s pretty easy to integrate the expansion into the main game; you’re not having to take things out of it.” There are no rounds or phases during the game. The only game-ending condition is when a player plays the last card from their hand. That might sound like a definite line in the sand, but it isn’t, as you’re constantly drawing and playing cards. Far from being an easily observable event on the horizon, triggering the end of the game takes some deliberate planning. The fact that the end of the game is player-driven led to some concerns from the community, me included. If playing cards is how to score points, and playing your final card ends the game, why wouldn’t you just keep drawing and playing to amass a crazy number of points? Fans of the PC game will immediately recognise the character artwork

If you go to the Arctic, it gives you points, and if you go there are a number of times it gives you access to special buildings,” Wallace says about the new region. “These give you ongoing benefits, so there’s a lot more engine building in the game.” Three player is certainly the sweet spot. At two players it doesn’t highlight the trading mechanism enough, whereas four players is just too long. With three players there’s enough trading to be had without the system overstaying its welcome. This also makes the end game trigger more dynamic as you’re not battling between two people to push for the finale. Final Thoughts: The pacing of the game starts out great. I really like the initial puzzle when you get your starting hand of cards and then have to look at the board to figure out how to build your engine to get to the resources you want. Given the way that you can trade with other players, you also have to look at what other people are building because sometimes it is easier to trade with someone for a good rather than build your tech tree and all directions to get all the things you need. And, since there is a limit of only 2 tiles per industry; you will be forced to use trade as it is simply impossible to get all the tiles you need/want. Of course, you will need enough ships to provide enough trade tokens for you to get those goods. In some ways, it’s a valid concern. You can play that way if you want to, but the reality of it is that this doesn’t really happen. Sure, I’ve seen some games dragged-out longer than necessary, but the worry about it turning into a never-ending slog doesn’t materialise. There comes a point where you are happy with what you’ve created, and if that doesn’t happen for you, it will for someone else, and the game ends anyway. Discovery

Stay as Long as You’d Like

What happened to Kev is what happens to a lot of first-time players of Anno 1800: they spend too much time building up their engine, instead of just speeding towards the ending by fulfilling their hand of cards. cubes (Workers) and two red (Artisans). Place them in their matching districts. Each player then receives seven Farmer/Worker Cards, and two Artisan/Engineer/Investor Cards. This is your starting hand of Population Cards. Beyond this, I do find the theme to be a little tired, even if it is directly based on a PC game and is trying its best to be faithful to this. Regardless of the spin on trying to keep your population happy by meeting their needs, this is a primarily white European nation expanding into new worlds where only then does diversity start to creep into the cards. As a fictional historical exercise, it doesn’t take much to inject diversity from the outset and shift the narrative away from potential comparisons in this realm. Even the exploration tokens feature crossed swords rather than a spyglass or compass, another hint at expansion at a cost. Objective cards provide direction for final scoring and are randomized at the start of each game. The cards drive the action in Anno 1800. You’ll start the game with 9 of them, and you’ll likely gain many more from there, because each time you add population, you’ll get a card matching the type of the worker you just added to your pool. These cards can be satisfied by producing the goods listed on each card, and will score 3-8 points at the end of the game.

Martin Wallace has produced many development games involving trading, resources and maps, so it’s perhaps not too surprising that he turned his mind to a game with production chains based on the PC game from some years ago.

I Like It

The end game trigger may feel like a race at first, but there is a definite balance of trying to score cards while also keeping objective card scoring in mind. The seven-point firework token for emptying a hand is significant, but smart players may try to forego this benefit by seeking out ways to negate it via the objectives. It may take groups some time to find the right balance of shifting away from adding cards to their hand and delaying the end game. We’ve been able to get a two-player game down to an hour, though our three-player games haven’t dipped below two hours yet. While it took some time for the game to show up, I’m thankful that it did. Playing Anno 1800 post-hype hasn’t dulled the sheen. It’s still a blast.