Great Western Trail (Argentina)

It’s GWT as you know it Jim, but with ships that periodically set sail, cities that your cattle will move around in, grain to feed your cattle with and farmers to try to help along the trail. It’s a technical masterclass in board game design – perhaps at the expense of emotional highs and lows. But for the (very) deep diving solo players out there: Welcome to Argentina.

Great Western Trail: Argentina
Designer: Alexander Pfister
Publisher: eggertspiele
2022

How to play:

Players start with a personal, face down deck of 14 ‘cattle’ cards – each card depicting a cow of a certain value and colour. After drawing four of those cards into your hand you will take turns to move your Estancieros (Rancher) up to three spaces on the board - thematically taking your cattle with you across the Pampas of Argentina towards the final spot in Buenos Aires to deliver your cattle to the waiting ships which are set to periodically sail off to various cities across Europe as the game progresses.

As you move across the board you will be landing on ‘building’ tiles which offer unique actions and more often than not the ability to do a little bit of hand management as you use up cattle into a discard pile and then draw back up to your hand limit at the end of your turn.

Along this Argentinian trail, Building actions will generally allow you to:

• Discard one or more of your cattle cards to gain income.

• Purchase new cattle cards from a shared market. These will not only award end game VP but more importantly will be of greater values (3 -5) than those that you started with in your personal deck (1 -2). The values on each of the cattle cards are important – as we will find out later!

• Build new buildings on the main board. In addition to the neutral starting buildings that all players share at the start of the game, you are also able to build new places to visit that only you will be able to benefit from, and reaping increasingly strong benefits as a result.

• Move your train forward - unlocking VP and bonuses along the way as well as opening up welcome shortcuts to your final destination.

• Acquire grain – your cattle is going to get hungry once they are loaded on to those ships in Buenos Aires!

• Purchase workers from a shared market and move them to your player board. The more workers that you have of a specific type, the stronger actions you are going to be able to take along the trail:

o Gaucho (Herder) – the more cowboys you have, the cheaper you can purchase stronger cattle cards for.

o Maquinista (Machinist) – the more you have the further you are able to move your train in a single action

o Carpintero (Carpenter) – the more you have the better a building you are able to build.

As you wind your way along the trail your path will often fork, and in addition to passing through or landing on buildings you may also have to pass through or land on Gaucho (Farmer) tiles. You’re going to have to pay a 1 or 2 coin penalty for the privilege – or instead you can offer to help the farmer by discarding cattle from your hand and trying to match the ‘strength’ value that is displayed on the farmers tile - gaining that farmer and either grabbing 2 victory points for each one that you have at the end of the game or instead converting the farmer into a worker. Very similarly to how the above workers erm, work, the more farmers you have working for you, the more grain you will receive when you need it.

Landing on other players buildings isn’t ideal – you don’t get to take their actions but instead a lesser ‘auxiliary’ action that is displayed on your player board – gain a coin, discard a card and draw one etc. As you deliver your cattle in Buenos Aires (and move your train forward) you will unlock more and more auxiliary actions that can be used not only when landing on an opponent’s building but as an extra action on some of your own building tiles.

Once you reach Buenos Aires

Get to Buenos Aires either directly or via one of the shortcuts that your train has opened up and then:

• Gain income depending on the total value of the unique cattle that you have delivered. Got two green cattle cards? Unlucky, you will only get income for one of them. Perhaps you might want to more carefully manage your hand next time you end up in Buenos Aires?!

• Load the cattle on to one of the ships that are available (paying in grain, or coins if you don’t have enough grain). Load a ship that is of equal or lesser value to the value of the cattle that you delivered. Take one of the discs from your player board that is covering an auxiliary action and place it on the ship.

• Add new workers to the shared market / farmers on to the main board. As new workers get added to the market, the games inbuilt timer will nudge further down – so no set rounds a such here, the longer it takes players to get to Buenos Aires, the longer the game takes. As that timer moves down as more workers are added, they will periodically trigger ships of a specific colour to set sail to one of three cities (three separate, double sided boards bristling with bonuses of VP, coins and free actions). Off your cattle roll, resting on the quay of the city. Next time you visit Buenos Aires you will be able to use any grain you have acquired to move your cattle from the Quay to a spot in the city. The more grain you have, the better a bonus you will trigger.

….and then back to the start you go, winding your way around the trail once more – this time perhaps with stronger cattle, more powerful buildings to visit and shortcuts to access thanks to your train.

Once enough visits to Buenos Aires have added enough workers onto the shared market to trigger the end of the game, then you will score about a million and one things – the VP on the cattle you purchased, VP on buildings you erected, VP for stations your train visited , farmers you gained, coins you have left over, optional objective (contract fulfilment) cards that you might have picked up along the way. The player with the most VP is crowned ‘the best taker of cattle to Buenos Aires in all of Argentina.’

My usual note of caution: That is a very simplistic overview of what is a dense game. For those that have played the original Great Western Trail, there will be a lot of familiarity (probably about 70-80%) with the ships, farmers and cities providing some new elements to wrap your head around. For players new to the world of Great Western Trail you would be well served by taking a very close look at the rule book and perhaps watching some play though videos as there is quite a lot to take in with this one.

Solo Headlines:

As a first edition owner of the original Great Western Trail I hadn’t had the pleasure of playing it solo as it didn’t come with an official solo mode out of the box and I never got around to trying the much respected ‘Garth’ fan made solo variant. That was much to my shame it would appear as I now note that in both the second edition of GWT, as well as this Argentina variant, the official solo mode is based on Garth which I realise (a little late to the party) was designed by Steve Schlepphorst (and others) who also created the official solo mode for firm favourite Gùgōng. As a result I had high hopes here in Argentina – even if Steve isn’t formally credited as the official solo mode designer.

…and I wasn’t let down. Pedro our opponent here is excellent – very much satisfying my checklist of things that I actively seek in a solo opponent:

• Is an actual point scoring opponent. Check.

• …but, takes minimal effort to operate. Check.

• And the sweet spot: chases an intelligent strategy as a human player would. I don't mind very basic solo modes that provide minor competition for things on an arbitrary and simplistic level, but I always really appreciate simple solo modes that ALSO create a facade of intelligence without needing to go into flowcharts or it's moves taking longer than my own. Check, Check and Check.

What we have with Pedro is Easy, Medium and Hard difficulty settings - and Pedro starting with a randomly assigned worker which gives him a starting strategy. Perhaps he might be focusing this game on cattle, perhaps on building, perhaps on moving his train. Of course he will be doing a little bit of all those things during the game - but much like a human player he is going to be having a primary strategic focus for sure and one that might change as his game progresses, again much like the occasional pivots that we all have to make sometimes.

Practically speaking things are a simple ‘flip a card, move the indicated number of spaces, take the simple action as displayed on the card’. Where things get clever is that there is often a choice of two actions - one to take if Pedro has the displayed specialism or if not, a different action - so for example ‘if your specialism is the Herder then buy a cattle card, it not then do nothing’ or ‘move one spaces forward, but if you are focusing on a building strategy then move forward by the amount of Carpenters that you have’ or ‘gain a worker of your currently preferred strategy, otherwise just buy the cheapest available’. Pedro tries to get stronger in one particular area and performs better in that specific area as he gets stronger – much like a human player. Ok, its cheating a lot to get there. But its cheating quickly, intelligently and smoothly. And I like it.

For this Joe Average scorer the medium Pedro difficulty provided more than enough of a challenge (at the time of writing I have only managed a draw) – with each difficulty level seeing Pedro score more strongly but also seeing him move a little more quicky towards Buenos Aires, giving you less time to plod slowly from tile to tile and really having to think through which key actions you will take. This doesn’t feel however as quick or rushed perhaps as Maracaibo from the same designer, or to a lesser extent Boonlake. Things feel a lot more close to the actual 2p experience (special thanks to Mrs Headlines from a Solo Player for letting me check this). Perhaps one day I might give Hard difficulty a go – but it’s not going to be any time soon that is for sure.

A solo game plays longer than my usual 60 minute sweet spot – and it’s hard to give an official game time given that the game doesn’t have a pre-defined number of turns in a round, or indeed a pre-defined number of rounds. Even though the solo mode is quick and simple to manage you can still expect games to take somewhere between an admittedly vague 75 – 120 minutes, plus setup (and what a setup it is!). This isn’t going to be a quick to the table, quick to play solo game all done and dusted in an hour or less. This is going to be a game you set aside time to both play, and most likely keep on the table to plumb its depths – but more on that as I talk more generally later.

In short though, my last three experiences with Pfister solo modes have been excellent – Boonlake, Skymines and now Argentina proving to be very user friendly, easy to learn, easy to manage, enjoyable solo modes. Bravo.

General Headlines:

I may not have massive emotional reactions as I work through the ebbs and flows of Alexander Pfister’s games but I don’t think that is why I play his games (though I concede that those multiplayer races in Maracaibo buck the trend). I play a Pfister game as I know I am going to be staring at a technical masterclass in both depth and decision making, whether I like it or not. And it turns out that GWT: Argentina is another rock-solid showcase of what a mid-heavy Euro can do - the epitome of the phrase ‘a gamer’s game’. It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest when I read of its predecessor (the original Great Western Trail) having fans play 100+ games of it. This is a game that demands your full attention as well as a significant time investment - both short, medium and long term.

That investment starts right from the setup and playtime. Be advised that the set up here is a task and a half – tiles, cards, player pieces, ships, cities, workers, farmers, solo board and cards. It’s a long one, and along with the potential for meandering solo games to run closer to the 120 minute mark at their maximum then this isn’t going to be a ‘quick off the shelf and bash out a swift game’ experience. Set some time aside for this one – you’re going to need it. That isn’t at all a complaint – as a solo player I quite like the meditative reflections and ponderings that a quiet evening with a longer set up and game brings. I just don’t like it every time. So be warned, set some time aside for this one - and enjoy.

You’re also investing some time in learning this one. If you have previously played Great Western Trail then you are going to be in largely familiar territory albeit with some new things to learn and explore. However, if you are new to the world of GWT or like me it had been an eternity since you last played then wow, this is a pretty hefty set of rules. Things aren’t helped by the rulebook which isn’t the greatest (particularly having been spoiled previously by the excellent Skymines rulebook). While on the face of it the arc of the game is pretty simple – ‘draw 4 cards, move up to 3 spaces, perform an action, eventually find yourself at the end of the trail, load your cattle onto a ship, ship sails to a city, move cattle off the ship onto to a spot in a city, repeat.’ there is real complexity in how you do those things – this is a game where you will follow different and very distinct strategies and those strategies of themselves feel quite dense. Don’t expect a cursory glance through the rulebook and quickly be up and running – this is on the heavier side of mid heavy both comparatively to the original GWT because of its additional mechanisms but also because of the general density of its own ruleset.

And then finally, you will be investing time in the long term to explore the depths of Argentina. I can see some people playing this once or twice and thinking ‘it’s pretty good but I am not sure what all the fuss is really about’. Even after my first 11 plays I only just now feel comfortable enough with all of the different paths to victory to then begin exploring the depths of each one and I can easily see how people can blink and have 100+ games under the belt. The strategies are deep - and you’ll quickly realise the contradiction that you can’t do a small amount of everything but you absolutely still need to do a small amount of most things! You’ll certainly have to focus heavily on at least one strategy and go in hard – but then face the juggle of trying to at least stay afloat in the other areas. For example, I might not be focussed on getting a huge amount of grain this game, but I am going to need some. I might not be going all out to get my train to the end of its tracks but I am going to have to move it a little so that I don’t find my path to Buenos Aires getting harder to reach. I might not be going all out to have the greatest cattle by the end of the game but if all I have is my starting hand throughout the game then I am going to find it tricky to load my cattle onto decent ships. The tension between needing to do one thing well but also doing everything else just enough is excellent.

The initial set up of the board will be different each time thanks to the starting buildings being randomly placed. This is going to give some food for thought on what strategies you are planning – as will the starting set of workers that have been randomly placed on the market. Are you going to focus on Herders and buying cattle – ensuring that you when you reach Buenos Aires you will have a strong hand of cattle to load onto the best boats? Perhaps you might focus on building heavily, tactically placing buildings to both hinder your opponent but also open up a plethora of strong actions for you to use during the game. Perhaps you are going to push your train as far as you can to unlock those sweet shortcuts, upgrade stations and gain station bonuses…Each of those pathways take time to learn their secrets - but to be honest, all of them are pretty much what you would have been getting from the original GWT. What we have here in Argentina however is some additional levels to explore and think through…

Short term pain, long term grain...

Regardless of which strategy you follow, Argentina also begs of you to keep a constant eye on the acquisition of grain as a resource. In the original GWT coins and cattle were the games main resource – enabling you to pay your way along your chosen strategic pathway. That is still the case on the Pampas of Argentina but here you also have to think through how you are going to feed your cattle with grain. This isn’t optional : no grain = no movement around the cities that your cattle ends up in = getting beat in the game. Getting small amounts of grain throughout the game is pretty straightforward enough, but you also have the option of making it your main strategic focus – so as well as either buying cattle, building heavily or moving your train as far as it can go, you might want to instead be trying to help farmers placed along the trail – farmers that will cost you a fee each time you pass them by, but farmers that can also be recruited as workers who will enable you to get more grain. Helping farmers is a pretty straightforward ‘farmers have a unique strength value, sacrifice some of your cows from your hand to help them’. That said, giving up good cows is an agonising choice given the fact that you are wanting to keep good cattle for loading on to ships, as well as rarely having good enough cattle in your hand to meet the farmers strength value (though there are ways to mitigate – but I will let the rulebook explain that one!). This additional Farmers strategy feels distinct from the others in Argentina, and those in the original version of GWT.

The loading of your cattle onto ships (another element that is new here in Argentina) takes repeated playthroughs to start feeling more and more comfortable with - seeing that different ships set sail at different points and realising that you are able to make choices on whether to take the quick wins on ships first to set sail or instead play a longer game and load cattle on to a ship that might take a while to depart. Once the ships arrive at their destination, there is then thought needed as to which bonuses to try and take which cost ever increasing amounts of grain – again do you take a smaller bonus now with the grain you already have or do you wait it out until you have more grain and take a bigger reward - as long as you get there first that is! The ships in Argentina add an element that I frequently like to see in games - the use of time as a mechanism (another similar example is the excellent Messina 1347). Here in Argentina it’s not only about what you do, but importantly when you do it. It’s this when that I think gives Argentina another of its unique selling points.

Ok, let’s get some negatives out of the way.

In addition to some of those caveats mentioned above - set up time, game length, the game feeling technically superb but perhaps not offering me any emotionally charged highs and lows (all of which are totally fine as I know that this is what I should be expecting from the game) there are a couple of more general grumbles….

First one is the main board and tiles – a gloss finish and blimey it is ridiculously shiny and reflective. If you are using a table lamp or anything overhead that is close to the board then get your sunglasses at the ready. Blinding. I also ponder some of the colour choices – the colour palette of the main board feels at times so similar that it’s difficult to distinguish routes and pathways. After a couple of plays things become intuitive but I do wonder if there were particular reasons for the choice of colours – perhaps making the game colour blindness friendly? In which case I have no issues as I would rather have mild grumbles than see someone else unable to play the game at all. Some of the colour choices of specific tiles also feel too similar – yellow and orange in particular as well as the unforgivable choices for the anchor symbology – which is becoming a more regular gripe now in Pfister games after the blue / green / grey resources in Skymines.

…and much like Skymines, there isn’t a Victory Point marker on the main board giving me an indication as the game progresses on how I might be doing comparatively to my opponent. It isn’t until end game scoring that things are added up and a winner declared. Its not a huge issue this – perhaps the tension of having no idea at all whether you have won or lost as you play is some people’s cup of tea. Personally, some of those emotional highs and lows that I like in a Euro do come from gradual and incremental creeping forward of the VP marker and the thrill of the chase, or the thrill of a big move visually paying off.

The inevitable ‘which version is better’ answer:

So, with the caveat that I haven’t played GWT Second Edition at all - or indeed the First Edition solo, I have however now played GWT, GWT with its (wonderful) Rails to the North Expansion and now GWT: Argentina.

Personally, I enjoyed GWT – but I didn’t feel blown away by it. I really enjoyed the Rails to the North expansion – it added just enough to both tip the game in to my preferred mid-heavy weight as well as giving some other meaty (no pun intended) things to plot and plan.

GWT Argentina brings a similar level of weight as that found in GWT + Rails to the North. Crudely speaking – if what I am saying is that GWT Argentina and GWT + Rails to the North are pretty evenly matched but one of those requires you to buy both a base game and an expansion then I think I’d probably be nudging you towards Argentina and its one time purchase. That said, while the two games aren’t radically different there is enough here to see why this trilogy (New Zealand to follow) is probably going see every version within my collection - a whole trilogy that enables me to visit the world and mechanisms of GWT and have variation each time, much like games that have modular expansions that I occasionally like to add to mix things up and add or remove weight.

For now though if you are hesitant about getting multiple copies of a similar game (or indeed your budget doesn’t stretch), I’d say stick to the base game if you prefer the medium side of mid heavy or Argentina if you err on the side of heavy and don’t want to have to shell out for the (excellent) expansion to the original game.

At a glance:

Deck building, hand management, tile placement, engine building, resource management, contract fulfilment – mechanism upon mechanism coming together smoothly and inviting the player not just to play a game, but instead to invest time into discovering on a deeper level the many ways that the game can be played. It’s a deep diving mid heavy Euro fans dream. It might not be providing instant hits of dopamine but the rewards will be many depending on the time and effort you put into learning this games many secrets

+ Simple, quick, intelligent solo mode that very much feels like playing against a human opponent

+ A dense game with real depth, rewarding repeat plays

+ New elements offer something for both new and returning GWT players

+/ - Set up and game time can take a while.

- Some poor choices in the colours used on some symbols and tiles genuinely cause some strain as does the glossy main board.

Final Score:

9 out 10. Some games I play are probably a 6 / 7 but they make me feel like they are a 9. This game is a 9 whether it makes me feel otherwise or not. A technically superb design.

Reviewed after 11 plays.