Part review. Part comparison. Part cake analogy.
Great Western Trail: New Zealand
Designer: Alexander Pfister
Publisher: eggertspiele
2023
How to Play:
At its core: business as usual…
Sitting now as part of a trilogy of Great Western Trail (GWT) games alongside GWT (2nd Edition), its excellent Rails to the North (2nd Edition) expansion and GWT: Argentina, this final New Zealand themed game takes everything that we thought we already knew about GWT and adds more. A lot more. Before exploring the many Antipodean differences on offer here lets recap a little on the core gameplay that drives each of the GWT series:
GWT games see you moving your Rancher / Estanciaro / Herder* up to three spaces around a rondel – landing on buildings that will usually see you discarding numbered cattle / sheep* cards from your hand in order to take actions (a simplistic example would be ‘discard two black cards to gain X amount of coins). By the time you weave your way around to the end of the eponymous ‘trail’ you’ll have done your best to try and manage your hand as carefully as possible so that you are able to ‘deliver’ the highest numerical value of unique cattle / sheep* to their undoubtedly delightful new final pastures where they will get to live out the rest of their days in peace and tranquillity (ahem).
Making deliveries not only gains you money, points and other bonuses but it also unlocks an ability for you to use from that point forward – perhaps you might unlock the ability to move up to four spaces at a time rather than three, or to be able to have five cards in your hand rather than four… and so on.
Round and round the rondel you go trying to make higher and higher valued deliveries - knowing that you are generally unable to deliver cattle to the same place as before and thus face a consistently tight battle. Helping you along the trail though is the ability to purchase workers - perhaps for example carpenters that let you build evermore powerful buildings to visit on the trail.. Perhaps Ranchers might be the thing that you purchase – they will help you to buy better cattle / sheep* cards making those final deliveries a little easier each time. You get the idea.
The more you deliver, the more powerful you become. The more workers you employ, the more you are able to specialise in specific areas. Round and round you go always trying to deliver the best hand that you can – trying to avoid hazards as you go, picking up objective cards that also let you do a little bit of contract fulfilment, finding little bonuses here and there. Eventually, someone makes a delivery which triggers the games inbuilt timer and its Game Over. Start scoring up the various points that are available pretty much everywhere – deliveries you have made, new cards you have obtained, buildings you have placed, objectives you have completed, clearing certain spots on your player board, being the player to have triggered the end game – points everywhere.
(*delete as appropriate)
The New Zealand twists...
GWT Argentina set about taking that core gameplay loop and added in something quite unique – the ability to not just deliver cattle, gain the rewards and then head off straight back around the rondel but to instead see you loading your delivered cattle onto boats which would sail off later in the game at different times and to different places which would get you different bonuses. It felt 80% familiar but had this 20% of something new which made it feel somewhat distinct. New Zealand approaches things a little differently and instead feels like it takes the core gameplay and builds on it, adding significantly to the complexity. It would be fair I think to now view the original GWT as the medium weight member of the family, Argentina lifting that weight and running time slightly by adding a whole new area to focus on and now New Zealand letting everyone know that it’s the heaviest in the series by virtue of the sheer volume of things that it has going on.
Firstly (and this will be very familiar to anyone that has played the original GWT with its Rails to the North expansion) there is now a new whole mini game at the top of the board that lets you move a boat around to try and reach new places to deliver your sheep to – with lots of other bonuses and benefits along the way. You are now not just restricted to the basic delivery spaces – feel free to sail out and try to unlock some new ones in uncharted territories!
The thematic change in New Zealand from delivering cattle to delivering sheep also brings about new thing to focus on - visiting a sheep shearer! Much like being able to manage my hand to deliver my sheep at the end of the trail I can now also manage my hand to try and shear my sheep along the trail. Whereby in previous games I could perhaps employ an engineer to help me move a train or a rancher to let me purchase better cattle, in New Zealand I can also now employ shearers to help me shear greater numbers of sheep. Shearing sheep works much the same as making deliveries – I use up a certain number of cards in my hand, gain money, get to unlock another ability on my player board etc. “What is the point of them then” I hear you cry “why not just keep the game so you only make deliveries rather than complicate things by making it so that you can deliver AND shear your sheep?” Well, the simplistic answer is that being able to do both lets you discard more cards from your hand than you would if you were just delivering cattle. In New Zealand I can discard a good chunk of sheep cards when I deliver and when I shear sheep so I find myself cycling through my deck at a much greater pace.
…which brings me on the final big difference between New Zealand and the other two games in the series: Deck Building. At various points in the game – perhaps moving your ship to a certain point on the upper half of the board or delivering sheep to a particular space – you gain a new ‘bonus’ card from a variable supply. Once one or more of these bonus cards make their way into your hand from the draw pile then you can immediately trigger their bonus - perhaps moving your way up a track, gaining some coins, gaining new unique sheep card etc. Now not only are you trying to manage your hand of cards as you move along the trail but now you are frequently having the opportunity to add new bonus cards to your hand. Which ones to take? Well some are going to clearly complement your strategies for the game and you might want to try and go heavy on gaining them so that more and more make their way to the table and their bonuses get triggered!
A ‘pathfinder’ track to move up to get VP and other bonuses, a market of bonus tiles. Everywhere I look there are options / strategies / bonuses / interlocking mechanisms. There is a lot going on here…
Solo Headlines:
If you have played any of the other solo modes in the series – Sam in the original GWT or Pedro in GWT: Argentina, then you are going to be in more than familiar territory here with Sarah – no real changes at all and while I haven’t scrutinised each of the cards from the different games I even got the slight feeling that actions in New Zealand felt fractionally simpler and straightforward.
For those new to the series, the solo mode here is very simple to run. You will be competing against a point scoring opponent that uses a small stack of cards, removing / adding certain cards to alter the difficulty to your preferred level. At the start of the game ‘Sarah’ will randomly choose a strategy that she will attempt to chase during the game – perhaps she is going to be shearing sheep, building, sailing, or trying to buy sheep. Perhaps her strategy might even change as the game progresses. Regardless, each time you flip a card you will move her an indicated number of spaces along the trail and then take one of two displayed actions - either an action that aligns to her strategic objective or a more generic version. For example, if in this game my solo opponent’s strategic objective is to try and buy sheep I may flip a card that says ‘well, buy some sheep then given that this is what you want to do!’ but if buying sheep isn’t my strategic objective it will instead say ‘well, maybe take this other little action like moving a couple of steps more along the trail or grab another little bonus or something’ instead. There is a tiny (and I mean tiny) amount of housekeeping once it reaches the end of the trail and back around it goes.
The solo mode in GWT: New Zealand strikes a really good balance. It’s a point scoring opponent to compete against, it is actively chasing its own strategic objectives which can vary game to game and its very quick and simple to run. The trade-off here is that those people that want a solo opponent that mimics identically how a human player would at the expense of speed and simplicity are not going to enjoy it. Sarah might chase preferred strategies but her turns are largely a case of just moving or collecting something arbitrarily and by the end of the game scoring up all of the things she might have arbitrarily gathered. But you know what? That will more than do for me - its quick, it grabs things I might have had my eye on, it mixes up main board with new buildings and does all of that so quickly and with a semblance of trying to do a preferred strategy. I can’t say fairer than that.
Another thing to mention is that in addition to the standard ‘Easy, Normal and Hard’ difficulty levels, there are other suggested (and simple) ways to tweak the difficulty level even further which I appreciated and which results in a suitable challenge for most abilities. What this also addresses is a potential issue that some players might have with the solo opponent and how quickly it goes around the rondel. You can expect the Easy mode to feel slower, Normal to go at a decent (but zippy enough) pace and Hard mode to be a breakneck speed race. So if you want to take it nice and slow but still have a challenge, maybe play on ‘easy’ but make those other tweaks to difficulty to still offer up a challenge. That said, I didn’t particularly make those tweaks - I played on Easy mode for the first game or two and then just stuck to Normal difficulty which I will say I found more than a challenge. This is a tough game to beat...but more on that in a moment.
Running time c.80 minutes with a hefty set up.
General Headlines:
Much like its predecessor GWT: Argentina, don’t expect a ‘quick to the table’ game here and not only is there going to be a lengthy set up but it’s certainly worth mentioning that this game is an absolute table hog – playing solo on a 6x4 table still saw me significantly struggling for space. That long set up and vast real estate also give a good indication of what is going on gameplay wise - ‘more, more and more’. GWT New Zealand retains all of the strategic depth of the previous games and throws just about everything but the kitchen sink at it. This isn’t necessarily a criticism – I can see GTW: New Zealand appealing to two groups of people: a) those that perhaps have never played a GWT game but have a thirst for games on the heavier side of mid-heavy due to the sheer volume of options and b) those that really enjoy the original GWT (with our without its expansion) and crave much of the same but amped up to the max.
For those that have played both the original GWT and GWT: Argentina and enjoyed how Argentina felt both familiar but also brought something different and unique then I think it is worth noting that New Zealand doesn’t (for me) bring about that same feeling of a unique twist - just more of what you might already love about the original game (particularly if you have played it with the Rails to the North expansion). That isn’t to say that I think GWT: New Zealand is bloated - it just has a much higher level of complexity due solely to the significant volume of things going on. Those things are enjoyable – I like climbing tracks, I like having to do some careful hand management, I like having a variety of strategies to explore, I like doing some deck building, delivering sheep, shearing sheep, sailing around in a boat, unlocking bonuses from my player board, racing around a rondel, building buildings, doing some contract fulfilment and more. If I hadn’t played the other two games in the GWT series then my tiny mind would be blown by the sheer audacity of GWT: New Zealand and how the game just works brilliantly and how it is another technical masterclass from Alexander Pfister. Indeed my tiny mind is blown. This is an excellent game.
…but I have played the other games in the series.
For a significant amount of people the ‘more’ in GWT: New Zealand is going to = better. I appreciate that. For me though I got the same feeling I would if I had huge cake all to myself thinking that it looked absolutely delicious, scoffing it all down slice by slice and then right at the end thinking to myself “I wished I had stopped after that first slice as I feel quite sick now!”. Indeed I found myself dazzled at first by all the chocolatey extras that GWT: Zealand brought to the table and my eyes were certainly bigger than my belly. But ultimately I ended up finding myself craving something smaller. It’s fair to say that I am never going to be the highest scoring player at this or indeed any mid-heavy Euro. I adore them but that isn’t to say that I in any way, shape or form am ‘excellent’ at playing them. I find all of the GWT games challenging to play, indeed that is what I quite like about them - they have a real depth to their strategies and they beg of me to try and improve and get better. But for me to ‘get better’ at GWT I find myself trying to hone in with pin point laser precision on a strategy and trying my utmost not to deviate from it - boom or bust and if I have focused hard enough sometimes I hit more ‘boom’ than I do ‘bust’. Here though in GWT: New Zealand that laser sharp focus often found itself hobbled by the sharp increase in opportunities to make bad decisions. “That’s your fault and not the games fault” - I can hear people shouting and they are absolutely right but for this Average Joe player I just found all of the many additional options were only serving to distract me from playing well. GWT is a tight, tight, tight game and I just felt that New Zealand’s ‘more’ wasn’t just bringing me more options, but instead was more often bringing me more distractions.
Make no mistake: I am not saying that GWT: New Zealand is a bad game. It is a more than good game and will really appeal to the types of players that I mention earlier. If that is you then welcome to your new favourite game! I for one am glad I own it, glad to have the trilogy in my collection and I will most certainly bring it back to the table. The question is, how frequently compared to the other games in the series…
Which game in the series is my favourite?
The short answer is the original Great Western Trail with its Rails to the North expansion: Clean, concise and focussed. I acknowledge the additional financial outlay involved in picking up both a base game and an expansion might feel unjustified for some but I think the flexibility that it brings is worth it – particularly as I think both the original and the expansion can be picked up for a reasonable price comparatively to some other Euro games of a similar weight. While I would rarely if ever choose to play GWT without its Rails to the North expansion as it gently and simply lifts the base game, having the option to play occasionally without it is great. While I never did get around to reviewing the original GWT you can read my review of its Rails to the North expansion here.
GWT: Argentina finds itself closely in second place. It adds ‘more’ but not a huge amount more. What it does add feels distinct, fresh and enjoyable. The main reason I think it’s nudged into second place rather than first is that it plays a little long for my personal tastes - sometimes nudging up to the 120 minute mark. It didn’t outstay its welcome - I just prefer something closer to the 60 – 75 minute mark. A minor grumble for what was an excellent addition to the series. You can read my review of GWT Argentina here.
And taking the bronze medal in third place is GWT: New Zealand a game that undoubtedly will be a lot of peoples favourite version. I will certainly revisit it to see if I can get better at it, but after this first tranche of plays I found the volume of additions to the core gameplay somewhat distracting.
That is all more than subjective of course! The fact remains that whichever game in the series YOU choose to play (New Zealand or otherwise) you are going to be playing a technical masterclass in strategic depth.
At a glance:
The trilogy is complete and GWT: New Zealand will certainly appeal to those that have never played a GWT game before but have a thirst for games on the heavier side of mid-heavy due to the sheer volume of options, as well as those that really enjoy the original GWT and crave more - a lot more. For this player, arguably too much more - however GWT: New Zealand remains undoubtedly a very good entry in the series regardless.
Final Score:
7.5 out of 10
Reviewed after 12 plays.
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