Our review
Wien 1913
Waiter, there is a wooden cube in my cake
„What’s a Viennese’s favorite pastime? Nothing – and only grudgingly!” (Severin Groebner). And yet, the absolute favorite pastimes of Viennese are ranting, grumbling, whining and nagging, despite or maybe just because this is of no use and therefore even meaningless and preposterous. Sometimes, whining can help, after all: My protest over too little Viennese flair in “Vienna” (See WIN 481, issue July 2015), has been noted by the Austrian Games Museum. The museum has published the tactical dice and card game “Wiener Ringstraße”, just in time to the 150 Years Anniversary of the official opening of this ring road. The cards of the game – showing images that have been taken from historic picture post cards – are available for free download and are very suitable for a virtual promenade along Ringstraße – the download can be found at www.spielemuseum.at/spieleatelier.
The rules of „Grand AUSTRIA Hotel“ too, make the golden heart of a Viennese beam happily: In those rules Waiter Leopold is up to his tricks and keeps commenting the rules with „Küss‘ die Hand“ und “habe die Ehre” (polite Viennese greetings to a lady or gentleman“ or even „Sie sind ja nicht deppert“ (local dialect for “You are not a fool“). After all, the topic, too, for a start fits the title of the game very well: We are meant to make our fortune - in the guise of victory points - as a hotel owners in Vienna at the start of the 20th century. Our hotels, at the start, have only three guest rooms and must continuously be expanded and upgraded. Alas, there is no „Grand AUSTRIA Hotel“ in Vienna, but there is the „Grand Hotel“ at Kärntner Ring 9-13, which originally was built for living quarters and 1866 transformed into a hotel; in 1869 a new wing was added. The hotel is also known for the secret meetings of Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera under its roof. Just across the road from „Grand Hotel“, “Hotel Imperial” at Kärntner Ring 16, was first intended as a Palace for Duke Philipp Alexander von Württemberg and his wife, Arch Duchess Maria Theresia of Austria; before the World Exposition 1873 it was changed into a Hotel. “Hotel Bristol”, too, at the corner of Kärntner Straße and Kärntnerring, was first run in a residential building and even before World War I the building hat suffered several reconstructions; and last but not least already at that time “Hotel Sacher” could be found.
Also very atmospheric and fitting are the resources that are used in the game – Cake, Strudel, Coffee and Wine. But, alas, with this we are done with flair and atmosphere. Cake, strudel, coffee and wine look exactly like the little wooden cubes that are used in countless other games for wood, stone, sand, coal and so on. Of course, one cannot expect cute little wooden pieces of cake in a game with a rather small print run, but with a little bit of imagination one could have improved a lot on the ambience. In fact, the cake is here represented by a wooden cube (I suppose this color is meant to represent whipped cream?) Why did they not choose pink and baptized the cube Punschkrapferl, for which the cube shape would have been an excellent simulation. And for coffee and wine, that is for cup and glass, discs would have been a much better simulation than cubes, especially as the drinks are acquired by another action than the sweets. Unfortunately, the symbols are also used on the character cards. Not even on those cards the resources are represented in “real” graphic symbols, there are again only images of the cubes, which in this case comes with the additional disadvantage of red and brown cubes being not easily distinguishable on the cards in case of non-optimum lights. After all, even the clearly less complex “Da Luigi “, which uses the same basic concept – dared to “translate” the little wooden cubes into pictures of the food they are meant to represent.
Furthermore, most of the customer cards are, unfortunately, only identified by the name of a profession, even if the „Portrait Painter“ was clearly inspired by Gustav Klimt. Concrete use and naming of persons from this period (as, for instance, in Café Melange) would have done the game a lot more good. At least there are – on the green tourist cards – a few amusing allegations and name giving; as regards to graphics the cards and the game boards are very beautifully designed and painted, something we can always expect from Klemens Franz. It remains a sad pity, that the efforts of design and components and the energy invested in it have only been sufficient halfway and did peter out.
The depicting of the „Neue Burg“ on the central board must be called a historical error; it is meant to get Emperor Franz Joseph into the picture, but the building of „Neue Burg“ was for the most part completed in 1913, and the rooms were never used by the Emperor (today the building is used by the Austrian National Library and the Museum of Art History). In its final stages, Emperor Franz Joseph lost interest in the project and transferred the overseeing of the building to the heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand. The illustration is also missing the two rider monuments in front of Hofburg, despite those monuments being elder by decades that the “Neue Burg”. Instead of the “Kaiserleiste” – Imperial Track” connected to “Neue Burg”, on which the playing pieces move to and fro – it might habe been better to use a graphic implementation of the so-called „Ringstraßenkorso“, the Ring promenade. The then so named Kärntner Ring was at that time a favorite hotspot and meeting point to see and be seen and for promenades of the „gentle folk“. In this way there would have been created not only a harmonious context with the real hotels and the hotels of the other players, it would have made a lot more sense to invite the customer cards into your hotel from the “Ringstraßenkorso” instead of luring them away from a kind of garden part in front of “Neue Burg”.
Finally we can direct our attention to the game itself: The names and the former oeuvres of the designer duo (Egizia on the one hand and Tzolk’in and Auf den Spuren von Marco Polo) are very promising references. The basic mechanism here, too, is dominated by dice; but contrary to “Marco Polo” they are not used in a worker placement mechanism, but all dice are rolled again at the start of each round and thus form a dice pool for all players. In your turn you choose and take one die and implement the action connected with it; each dice result is assigned one of six possible action options, with the Six being a joker for the other five actions.
The more dice are placed at the chosen action the stronger and more powerful the action is. The advantage for the starting player that arises from this mechanism, is – similar to the starting phase of Catan – balanced by reversing the turn order, that is the starting player is first and then last player of a round.
Elegant and fair as that implementation may be, it can be experienced as least as tedious due the down time for the other players. A player turn in this game can easily take several minutes, as we are playing a game that demands “painstaking diligence, accurateness, expertise and a certain delight in the solving of logic puzzles and brain teasers”, as the Constitutional Court or Tribunal has stated, albeit in another context altogether. And as there is no indication, how many dice will be available in one’s second turn, the starting player cannot really plan his next action well in the waiting time. A game of “Grand AUSTRIA Hotel” should therefore only be started with four players, when all of them are already sufficiently familiar with the game. Probably the game works best for three players, because if you play only with two player, you use only a total of 10 dice, so that you can rarely expect more than two dice at a certain action – after all, the main allure of the game lies in a dice distribution that deviates from the normative distribution that can statistically be expected.
At the same time, when reading the rules, one would be inclined to expect a rather quick game, as each player has only 14 turns in the game. And the individual actions, too, do not come across as being very time-demanding: For a result of One you acquire strudel and pieces of cake, for a result of Two you acquire wine and coffee. For a result of three pips you expand your hotel with additional rooms; for a result of Four you get money and/or steps on the “Kaiserleiste”; for a result of Five you may play a personnel card from your hand; and a result of six pips works as a joker for any of those five options, because there are fewer dice or none at all for that result.
The time-consuming reason for the down time, on the one hand, comes from the personnel cards: At the start you either are dealt six random cards or you can also – in case all players are already familiar with the game – choose six cards by drafting. When those cards are played they give various advantages, which can be unique, permanent, valid for the round or become effective at the end of the game – comparable to the Minor Improvements and Occupation cards in “Agricola”.
It is only logical that you want to use this advantages in an especially effective way. This decision on when which card is played to best advantage already, on its own, demands a certain amount of reflection, but the effect is definitely enhanced by the customer cards: To wit, after a customer card has been “filled” with the respective combination of food and drinks in demand, it moves into one of your own hotel rooms, which remains occupied to the end of the game, and yields, besides victory points, also a certain bonus.
In the final outcome this can open a can of worms of bonuses and consequences: For instance: I have two customers on display. One of them is lacking one glass of whine, which I acquire with the personnel card “barkeeper” that I did play earlier. So no the customer is “finished” and goes to one of my rooms. As a bonus I receive one strudel from this customer which I can use to make my second customer happy, that is, complete him. Thus, he also wanders into my hotel and presents me with a second bonus, which of course has to be considered carefully beforehand. Furthermore, the filling of rooms in my hotel can give me an additional bonus or even several bonuses, always when a closed region of the same color on the hotel board is completely filled – the rooms are available in red, blue and yellow colors. And, at long last, in this way I maybe manage to complete one of three general orders on display, which earn me the more points the earlier I can meet the requirements stated on it. And all those individual actions have resulted from my one free bonus action and I would now begin to implement my main action.
But, of course, the game does not usually „run away“ in the way I have described just now, but the demand of the selection of new customers, the expanding of your own hotel with additional rooms, the timely acquisition of hotel bonuses and the earliest possible meeting of orders result in more and more reflections and pondering; the more personnel cards you have on display, the easier you can overlook an option, so that you need to reflect more and more at the start of your turn. In this game all players should be especially tolerant and allow belated corrections – albeit, of course if they are comprehensible, which is in their own interest as this might, maybe, reduce the waiting time for their own turn, hopefully. Favorite mistakes can be: Forgetting to take a customer card before your main action or to mark an order that was completed.
At long last the fact that the chance element inherent in the game play, can, despite all the pondering and planning, destroy all the best plans of mice and men. It is not so much the random selection of dice and their results in a round that is experienced as disturbing, as this is not only a nice core mechanism of the game and you can react to it in several ways. On the one hand you are allowed to add a virtual die to your selection and thus strengthen the chosen action somewhat, albeit at the cost of one of the rather rare Kronen. And on the other hand you can pass the taking of a die for the moment, wait till the others have done their turns and can then roll the remaining dice again, minus one that is placed into the “garbage can”. This can be repeated several times, without any guarantee that the desired result will appear.
The random distribution in the display of customer cards is felt to be much more disturbing or worse, because their respective bonuses can, by pure chance, fit your own concept, or maybe not. The distribution of the customer cards and the hotel rooms into the three colors of red, blue and yellow can have even more decisive consequences, whereby the green customer cards work as a kind of joker and can be put into any room. If I desperately need a yellow guest and the display offers only red or blue customer cards, the very best tactics will be to no avail. This effect is enhanced by the “Kaiserleiste”: You should have moved a certain number of steps on it after every two or three rounds in order to be rewarded with victory points and an additional bonus. If you cannot manage to achieve this, you have to suffer a rather steep penalty. This might be considered to be fair, if you could accept this penalty deliberately, because other considerations seemed to be more important. But when the lap goal cannot be achieved only because there has been no chance at all to fill a yellow room on time, the resulting damage hits twice as strongly and unmerited, objectively and subjectively considered. The consequence will usually be that in the following rounds – maybe even for the rest of the game to the very end – the game will play worse for you than for the imperially rewarded fellow players.
Those color distinctions are open for questioning for the customer cards and the hotel rooms in more than one point: Why for heaven’s sake should an artist (= yellow customer card) insist on moving only into a yellow room, that is into a room with a yellow door. It would be more logical if guests would prefer a certain level of the hotel. The current concept is not only inconsistent, it also reduces the flair of the game and makes “Grand AUSTRIA Hotel” give off the flavor of an abstract placement game. Furthermore, players potentially interested in the game are rather frightened away than enticed to another game, and only extreme puzzler will have real fun with „Grand AUSTRIA Hotel.“ In certain ways the game is remindful of “Bora Bora”, in which a positively ingenious dice using mechanism has been showered with so many options, also including bonuses here and bonuses there, that in the end you had a mental overload. The dice mechanism in “Grand AUSTRIA Hotel” is not ingenious, but alluring enough so that it is a pity that the designers did not reduce their obvious plethora of ideas to a better manageable amount. This reduction might have resulted in a reduction of variations – at the moment there are 56 more or less different customer cards and 48 different personnel cards, and also as regards to the general orders and the rewards/penalties on the Kaiserleiste plenitude is part of the concept – but also in games that would be played faster and more often.
Harald Schatzl
Players: 2-4
Age: 12+
Time: 120+
Designer: Simone Luciani, Virginio Gigli
Artist: Klemens Franz
Price: ca. 40 Euro
Publisher: Lookout Spiele / Mayfair 2015
Web: www.lookout-spiele.de
Genre: Resources management, action choice via dice pool
Users: For experts
Version: de
Rules: de en
In-game text: no
Comments:
Prone to extreme puzzling
Chance element can provoke frustration
Long down times with four players
Nice graphic design
Compares to:
Da Luigi, Panamax, My Village, Agricola
Other editions:
English edition, Mayfair Games
My rating: 5
Harald Schatzl:
„Grand AUSTRIA Hotel“ uses a nice basic dice mechanism in a way that leaves very nearly only extreme puzzlers to enjoy the game; a little less would have been a little more here. As regards to Viennese flair one would well wish for more, because this is only implemented very rudimentary.
Chance (pink): 2
Tactic (turquoise): 3
Strategy (blue): 1
Creativity (dark blue): 0
Knowledge (yellow): 0
Memory (orange): 0
Communication (red): 0
Interaction (brown): 1
Dexterity (green): 0
Action (dark green): 0