A fresh new lick of '2nd Edition' paint, the introduction of an official solo mode - but a game that is otherwise largely unchanged from its original release back in 2009. How do things hold up in 2023? Very well as it happens…
Shipyard (2nd Edition)
Designer: Vladimír Suchý
Publisher: Delicious Games
2023
How to play:
In this second edition update to Vladimír Suchý’s action selection/rondel game, originally released in 2009, players take on the role of a 19th-century ship manufacturer. Each turn, you will choose an available action that will broadly see you:
• Grabbing ship tiles of varying costs from a shared display.
• Moving around a rondel to gain items that can be placed on your ships, such as sails, smoke stacks, cranes, and cannons.
• Moving around a second rondel to gain crew for your ship, such as Captains, Soldiers, Businessmen, and Stokers.
• Obtaining resources that can be sold or traded for varying levels of income or items depending on the position of a marker on a third rondel.
• Moving around a final rondel to obtain ‘employee’ tiles – ongoing bonuses that will help optimize your turns. For example, one tile might let you gain a Captain every time you use a particular rondel, while another might reward you with an extra coin every time you sell a specific resource… and so on.
• Taking a canal tile from a shared display, again paying a variable cost depending on which one you want to purchase. You will very much be needing canal tiles for your completed ships to sail on, and if you have been smart, you will have grabbed a canal tile with just the right bonuses for the type of ship you have built.
You start the game with six coins and you’d be well advised to gain more by selling resources or by gaining some as a reward for taking older actions that haven’t been used in a while. You can spend six coins during your turn to take another turn. Yummy!
You can choose to build lots of small ships or instead spend the game building one huge ship - it is entirely up to you. But once a ship is complete, it must set sail on your canal tiles. How many spaces it will move will depend on how many sails, stokers and smokestacks it has built. How many points it will score as it moves along the canal will depend on what else you placed on the ship. Perhaps your canal will have spaces that reward you if you have cannons and soldiers, or maybe it will reward you for businessmen and cranes. Maybe some of the ships you grabbed had lifeboats displayed on them which might earn you points along the canal. Be careful though – if you build a ship and you don’t have a Captain or don’t have enough canal to sail on, then it gains no points at all. Better get your timings just right in that case!
Don’t think either that you can put people or items anywhere on your ship! Let’s hope if you are wanting to put a businessman or soldier on your ship that one of your ship’s tiles has a cabin for each of them! Want to pop a sail on your ship to make it go faster? Yup, it needs to go into a specific space too. Everything that you place on your ship has a designated place where it needs to go, which makes your decisions on which ship tiles to purchase all the more important. Let’s hope too that you get the one that you really need before someone else gets there first!
As well as the points that you will gain from your completed ships and the points that they earn from the canals they have sailed on, you will also have been working towards two randomly assigned strategic objectives at the start of the game. For example, you might get a big chunk of VP if you have managed to build lots of small ships, or perhaps you needed to collect ship tiles that had a specific symbol on them, or maybe you get rewarded for having as many businessmen as possible on your ships. The possibilities are endless (well, maybe not endless but there is a big stack of contracts that could be fulfilled).
Build ships, put the right type of people and items on them, see them set sail, try to build them as per your strategic contracts. Job done.
Solo Headlines:
I suspect that those solo players who crave playing against a point-scoring automa and are averse to Beat Your Own Score (BYOS) solo modes will have already given this review a wide berth. They’ll know that it’s going to be business as usual for a Vladimír Suchý solo mode – an extremely simple flip of a tile or card which will display an extremely simple action such as removing something from the main display or blocking a space that you might have had your eye on. They will also know that Shipyard will have one or more points thresholds that they will try to beat - and will spend a good amount of time cursing the day they were born as they fail more often than not to beat them.
But if you have played and enjoyed the solo modes in Praga Caput Regni, Underwater Cities, Messina 1347, Woodcraft, etc., then you are going to be in more than familiar, happy territory. Here in Shipyard, you will mimic a three-player game – take your turn, then flip a tile to decide which action tile ‘Player Two’ will select and do its ‘removing of things’ from the main display or move arbitrarily around the rondel. ‘Player Three’ then does the same. Quick, simple BYOS stuff.
The point thresholds you are aiming for are 60 (‘newbie’), 85 (‘experienced’) and 95 (‘born to be a shipbuilder’). I mustered a mediocre 74 as my highest score during my first 11 plays, if that gives some sort of guide on the difficulty of the game, bearing in mind that I consider myself to be an average scoring player. ‘Born to be a Shipbuilder’ I am most certainly not.
To be clear, I’m not at all being dismissive of this solo mode or BYOS score solo modes in general. Quite the opposite. While I quite enjoy an easy-to-manage automa, I don’t particularly have any issue at all with BYOS solo modes, and I especially like them in Vladimír’s games. I guess some solo players will also play multiplayer and when they do play solo they may want to recreate that feeling of playing against another human opponent. Other than a few extremely rare multiplayer games, I am an exclusively solo player for a range of reasons, but mainly as I take most satisfaction not from playing against other players but instead from playing against the game. Vladimir’s games let me do this excellently across a range of themes and settings – ‘here are your turns, have fun exploring the sandbox, see how well you can do before running out of time’.
In the context of BYOS games, Shipyard does everything that I want it to do. It’s an enjoyable medium-weight solo experience that plays in approximately 45-60 minutes.
General Ramblings:
I’m one of those annoying Euro players that skims quickly over the setting of a game if ever I am introducing and teaching it to other players: “this one is about Mars. Ok, let’s start” or “you’re doing something pyramid-y in Mesoamerica. Right, onto how these dice move around the board.” I’m probably more than guilty of doing it in my reviews too. That said, I don’t think I am skipping too much setting or theme at all when I say “In Shipyard, you are building ships and sailing them off on a test run. The End.” as quite frankly that is probably about as accurate and full a description as I think it gets.
I’ll also confess that in my first play or two, that very straightforward theme and relatively straightforward gameplay left me feeling, dare I say, a little underwhelmed. One of the things that has strongly drawn me to recent Vladimír Suchý’s titles has been the complexity, the explosive turns, the combos that need to be found, bonuses triggering other bonuses – everything popping with satisfaction. Here in Shipyard, it is no exaggeration to say that you could go the entire game and not score a single point until your final move. No continuous dopamine hits – just slow, steady, incremental ship building.
So I built some ships…
I figured out how to maximize my coins so I could spend six to get an extra turn occasionally. Lots of good sacrifices – wanting to spend my money on other goodies but instead letting them go for the sweet taste of an extra turn this round.
…and then I built more ships.
I figured out how to ensure that the things I placed on the ship complemented each other. Easier said than done though when the thing that you need is so far away on the rondel.
…and then I built more ships.
I figured out which of the ‘employee’ tiles worked well with each other and with my overarching goals. More rondel agony and ecstasy. More sacrificing the immediate small win to instead pick up a tile that gets me next to nothing right now but is going to have an ongoing benefit from that point forth.
…and then I built more ships.
I figured out how I could control the speed of my ships to try and maximize points and bonuses. Lots of frequent moments of realisation that one of my ships will soon set sail but it’s just slightly too fast or too slow to reach the intended space that I need it to reach. Aaarggghhh.
…and then I built more ships.
I figured out that the strategic contracts I was chasing felt distinct and helped me to really think hard about the type of ships I was building. How refreshing to be given six potential contracts to try and fulfil right at the start but then see them whittle down to just two by the end of the game – giving me a little bit of breathing space to change direction if the game offered up different ideas than those I originally hoped it would!
….and then I built more ships.
I figured out that timings were crucial and an utter delight. If I complete a ship then it MUST set sail – but if it goes off without a Captain or a canal to sail on then it’s all been for nothing. Aaargh. That tussle of trying to get everything you need but getting it before your ship heads out is great. There is also another excellent use of timings - at the very end of the game you can take a final free action (any action) and one final Ship tile. It doesn’t sound like much but it absolutely changes the dynamic of the final third of the game as you keep that free action and final ship tile in mind knowing that if you can get everything else ready and set up then that final ship tile could just slot perfectly into the plan, complete a high point scoring ship and set sail for some bumper last minute points. This propels (pun not intended) things to a very tense 'I just need one more move' climax.
….and then I built more ships.
I figured out that I was rubbish at building ships. There will be seasoned players of the first edition as well as just generally excellent players that will be busting the highest 95+ points threshold every game, but I assure you now that I am never going to be one of them. I almost broke the medium difficulty once – almost. I think for an average Euro player like myself, the point targets are going to ensure you get your money’s worth as I think they will take you a while to reach.
…and finally, I started adoring the fact that all I was doing was building ships.
After a few games of Shipyard, I brought down another game with Vladimír Suchý’s name on the box – Woodcraft – convincing myself that “his more recent games are better, and I am going to prove it.” While I really like Woodcraft – and Praga, Messina, Pulsar 2849 (damn you Pulsar for not having a simple solo mode), Underwater Cities – it felt a lot more convoluted compared to my recent plays of Shipyard. There was lots of cutting, gluing and planting of dice, lots of different areas to juggle, lots of rules to digest, lots of icons to get familiar with, smaller sub-processes to understand and its action wheel needing two pages of a rulebook to understand how it works. I had fun for sure, but during my second or third replay of Woodcraft I started longing for the streamlined simplicity of Shipyard. So I returned to build even more ships!
I say “simplicity.” This isn’t a light game – I’d place it firmly in medium-weight territory. But it’s clean, clear, intuitive, focused, contained. It’s, well, it’s just… zen-like, albeit with more than a few moments to chew on! With that focus and streamlining comes a game that I suspect will be extremely easy to get down off the shelf after long periods away - not that I think Shipyard will be spending long periods away from the table, as quite frankly it has managed to wriggle its way firmly under my skin and firmly northwards in my estimation. I can see this becoming a 'go-to' game in my medium-weight solo collection.
The good games clearly stand the test of time.
At a Glance:
• A refreshingly streamlined, focussed, medium weight game.
• Limited setting and theme may put off players that want a sprawling epic to explore but its ‘just build some ships’ central conceit is addictive.
• A good challenge but only for solo players that are content with beat your own score solo modes
• An excellent blend of clear strategic contracts to fulfil but constant tactical pivots at almost every single turn.
• While Shipyard isn’t as complex and ‘combo’ driven as some of the designer's more recent titles it certainly holds its own amongst those heavy hitters in his canon.
Final Score:
8 out of 10. (Reviewed after 11 plays)
(Please note that the images in this review include optional wooden component upgrades that do not come as standard and need to be purchased separately).
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