OUR REVIEW

To the Peak of Yr Wyddfa

Snowdonia

A railroad to the mountain top

Smiling a bit to myself when reading the first lines of the rules, because they are talking about mountains, whose peaks can only be suspected within the low-ranging clouds - the highest mountain, the Yr Wyddfa or Mt. Snowdon (is not pronounced like snow/Schnee, but with an “e”) is about 1.085 meters high. We are in Wales, to be more exact in the north of Wales, in the third biggest British National Park. The region also goes by the name of Snowdonia or, in Welsh, Eryrr, which translated into English means Eagle’s Lair.

This region is a favorite destination for day trips due to its picturesque scenery and this might have been one of the reasons for the decision, made at the end of the 19^th century, to build a cog railway to the top of Mt. Snowdon, with a track width of 800 mm. This railway is the only cog railway in all of Great Britain. The construction was started at the end of 1893 and after a bit more than a year the first train reached the peak station in January of 1896. The official opening took place at Easter of the same year. This game tells about the creation of this cog railway.

The box cover shows a team laying track to the top of Snowdon. The game board features the mountain as a central element, albeit only slightly indicated so that the areas of the board are better visible. In the left-hand lower region you find the starting town of Llanberis, where each player puts one of his men. A second man is placed into the adjacent Pub.

Beginning in Llanberis, the stations are displayed in ascending order of their numbers! Please note that in case of 1, 2 or 5 players a different arrangement of stations is used. You play with the yellow side of the board, the blue one belongs to a version. How to set up the game is described on two very extensive pages in the rules which answer all possible questions. Simply keep to this set-up and implement it step by step, then the set-up will not be a problem and you will not keep guessing what the symbols might mean, like we did before we finally decided to consult the rules.

Onto the track cards you place the number of brown rubble pieces according to the number on the card. In the stations, too, you place the indicated number of brown stones onto the top buildings. 7 iron, 4 stones and 2 coals are placed on the three resources areas and the action areas are adapted to the current number of players.

The course of the game is simple and explained within 10 minutes. In turn, you place your two workers into the seven action areas. With the exception of the last area there is a limit of worker capacities in all those areas. It is important to know that when placing workers you can occupy and spot of your choice marked in those areas, as the order in which the actions are then implemented later on often is very important.

You implement actions from action area A to action area C under adherence to the order of the workers placed there. Actions that were chosen by placing a worker there must be implemented and cannot be simply forfeited. This very effectively bars a destructive way to play. Workers are given back to their owners after implementation of actions.

Action A yields resources from the three resources areas. You can never take more than one unit of coal. As resources are limited in numbers it can happen that you get nothing. The player who chose the last spot in Area A will be the next starting player.

Action B allows players to remove rubble. The amount of rubble you can remove depends on the speed-of-work track. The marker on this track indicates the amount of 1-4 pieces. You take those pieces into your personal stock.

Rubble cannot be removed in any way that you like; you must always start on the track card next to the starting station and work your way up the mountain to the peak station. Stations along the track are also freed of rubble. For freeing spots on the stations a player scores the number of victory points marked there. Should there be no rubble to remove the action is replaced by a building action (more on this in a minute).

Action C enables you to change resources up to three times, either 3 orange iron units into one steel unit or 2 rubble units into one stone unit. You can also combine those two exchanges. You must consider that the stone is drawn from the black resources stock bag and you must pay attention if one is available from there. For me this restriction is pure nonsense, as the resources of players are public and therefore can always be counted and added up. Why inflict a penalty if someone makes a counting error? Resources in such exchanges go into the bag; rubble is taken out of the game.

Action D enables you to lay down track. How many sections of track you can place is again determined by the speed-of-work track; either one or two sections will be possible. For each rack card that you place and that is already free from rubble you discard one unit of steel and turn the card over to its track side and mark it with your ownership marker.

Buildings can be constructed using Action E. To be able to set up a building the track in front of the station must be free of rubble. The track need not be built and it is also irrelevant if there is still rubble in the station. To construct a building you discard stones or steel, score the victory points marked and place one of your ownership markers.

As soon as the action Buy an Engine is available (more on this later) you can use Action E also to buy an engine/locomotive. Six out of seven locomotives are available in the game. To buy such an engine you pay one or two units of steel. Locomotives have two functions; if you discard one coal (or two coals in case of one of the engines) hire a worker from the pub for the current round and can do one additional action.

If you want to do this must be always announced before you place your first worker - so pay attention to the number of available action spaces, because the worker costs you one coal and this resource is very limited during all of the game and very often there is not enough of it.

The second function of a locomotive is allowing you additional actions or improvement of actions when implementing them. So you can remove more rubble (B), receive more resources (A), may build more tracks or pay only 2 iron when exchanging resources instead of 3 iron, and so on.

Action F enables players to take one of the openly displayed action cards. Those cards give you an instant action in the course of the game which is limited to one action or sometimes limited to the current round. Each card has also a presetting for additional victory points which you score at the end of the game. And, finally, in Action G you move your marker away by one step from the starting station. This marker is called Surveyor and can reach the next station even when there is still rubble on the track.

Should there be an order card still in position 1 it is discarded and the display is replenished to three openly displayed cards. The card now on top of the draw pile of order cards determines which weather disc is activated. Possible weather discs are Sun, Fog or Rain. The two weather discs on display are moved to the left and the new disc is added behind them.

The disc on Position 1 changes the weather. In case of Sun the two markers on the speed-of-work track are moved to the right and result in the possibility to build more track or to remove more rubble in the next round. In case of rain those discs are moved in a way that you will be less productive in the coming round. In case of Fog the actions of removing rubble and build track are not available. Then you discard the disc on Spot 1.

At this point in the game the storage places are refilled. Depending on the number of players you blindly draw resources from the resources bag. It can happen that you draw one or several of the five white event cubes. Those cubes are placed on the event track.

This track contains one spot which makes the locomotives available; from this moment on you can by locomotives using Action E. Other spots on the track result in removal of rubble and building of track by outside contractors. Such companies also can complete stations. One of the spots on the event track also demands servicing the locomotives. When you cannot manage to comply with this servicing of locomotives you must discard them.

These events considerably speed up the game, but for my liking the chance factor in that is a bit too high. One is planning on the next and next but one round and then by chance two white cubes are drawn and without a by your leave the cleared tracks might be gone or stations might be finished.

The game ends at the end of the round in which the last track section of the railway has been built. In case of two players the end can happen earlier, that is, then when players run out of ownership markers to place. For scoring the game provides a pre-printed sheet on which you can enter your scores and which helps you not to forget any points.

You score the ownership markers on track and stations (buildings), the locomotive #4 earns you 9 points and the surveyor the points for the station where he happens to be located, the higher up the mountain the more points the scores. For completed order cards you score different amounts of points, those are manifold and to describe them would certainly exceed the scope of this review. The winner is the player with the highest score; in case of a tie there are several winners.

During my career as a games player a did play lots of games with a historical topic, but for this one not only extensive and exact research was done, but one has achieved extraordinarily well to combine historical events and the flair of building a railway into a game that is easily playable.

Each of the locomotives and each of the stations are historically documented, and I will pardon the designers for inventing a few additional stations, that is, adding them to the track in order to create a playable track. All locomotives carry their historical names and it should be mentioned as an aside that today there are still four of the original locomotives running, one other needs only a boiler repair and yet one other is ready for a museum. Only locomotive #1 was destroyed at the opening day of the railway due to an accident.

Due to the near-to-reality use of weather you can nicely re-live how it is to build in rain or sunshine or must stop work due to fog. As you know the coming weather three rounds in advance (surely not possible when the real railway was built) the chance element provided by the weather is small. But, yet, we had one game when we had six times fog out of eight rounds and that lengthens the game incredible, because you have to think very carefully about how to distribute one’s actions usefully after such a phase, because one is in danger of having the game run away due to the outside companies building nearly everything-

The rules are not only clearly structured but also easily understood and in case of questions you quickly find the relevant passages for clarification. One small incongruence has turned up, though: For locomotive #6 the rules state that the worker in the pub costs one coal, the card names 2 coals as the price for the worker. As the additional action of this locomotive is very powerful I would imagine that the price stated on the card is correct.

As my esteemed readers correctly suspect, yes, I like the game. I like it when the background story fits, the historical dates are correct and the mechanisms interact well. This is absolutely and 100% the case here. Aside from that we had good fun in all games and with all age groups playing. If there is something to say to the game’s disadvantage it is the the rather abstract flair of the turns. And yet, worker placement games, so the new name for this kind of games, need not be dry and abstract, as proven by Agricola.

The reason for this may be that you do not really build something in Snowdonia that you can touch. In Agricola you have a farm which you expand and you set up fences and breed animals on your land. In Snowdonia all build at the same track and the only think you have in front of you are the resources and accordingly the game reduces itself to the actions and that comes over as dry and abstract

But as in all games there are different approaches to Snowdonia, too, for instance the notice on the box mentioning proudly that the game holds a lot of components. This might be an argument for a higher sales price and at first one is happy about it, but when the setting-up phase then is endlessly the enchantment vanes quickly.

The game plays nicely with all numbers of players, but still I cannot get enthusiastic about the solitaire game as I believe it to be unnecessary. It might help to get better acquainted with the flow of the game and to better understand the interactions of the order cards with the game and maybe some time in the future championships might happen, for which you then can train alone in your room. Otherwise I prefer the PC when I have nobody to play with.

During Spiel at Essen four promotion cards were available - two trains, Ivor the Engine, Jimmy and the Little Old engine, a station with an endless name and an additional action area H. These items are still available from the homepage of the publisher and are sent for a small remuneration for postage.

Finally, I can only congratulate Lookout and the designer on this game, because in a very close pack of good games at Essen it was one of the outstanding ones.

Players: 1-5

Age: 10+

Time: 90+

Designer: Tony Boydell

Art: Tony Boydell, Charlie Paull, Klemens Franz

Price: ca. 40 Euro

Publisher: Lookout Spiele 2012

Web: http://lookout-spiele.de

Genre: Worker Placement with a railway topic

Users: With friends

Special: 1 player

Version: multi

Rules: de en fr it

In-game text: yes

Comments:

Historically authentic, nice topic

All build one track together

Chance element is not a deciding factor

Compares to:

Basically all track building games

Other editions:

Currently none

My rating: 6/7

Kurt Schellenbauer:

When the weather doesn’t create havoc and you don’t disappear in fog then you might achieve a plan that will stand. Knowledge of all order cards and the special bonuses connected to them is essential.

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 2

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0