No one is surprised at this point that Anno 1800 is one of my favorite video games. I’m tired, I know, but I do it knowing that there is a small niche of crazy people out there waiting for someone to tell them that they are right -you have it, it’s a great game-. For them, and for all those with interest or love for board games, today I bring another great game: Anno 1800, the board game.
It fell into my hands last Christmas, but the fear of overwhelming my family with something extremely complex had invited me to prepare the ground little by little so that the board would not be thrown at my head. The moment has finally been this summer, and now I regret not having played year 1800 before.
The fear of approaching such a game
The fear was not unfounded. Those of you who have played the construction and management video game Ubisoft you know for a fact that the number of variables, resources and things to take into account can be overwhelming for the novice. It’s not a difficult game per se, but it can get dense and erratic until you understand the natural process of its evolution.
Moving all that collection of farmers, artisans, workers and investors producing wool to create clothes, planting potatoes to create liquor and traveling to the New World to get the pearl that you need to bind to the iron to create a ring and please the upper echelons of the Old World , seems like something complicated enough between virtual automatisms not to become a headache when transferred to a table full of resource tiles and citizen cubes.
Little did I imagine that, from one of those boxes full of pieces scattered on an empty cardboard – an interior that helps to organize and speed up the preparation is always well received, please -, a game would come out that was so easy to understand, so dynamic in his games, so much fun among rookies and so respectful of the year 1800 original.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the first Euro we’re approaching (they’re called that because of their origin and because they have the peculiarity of focusing on strategy instead of luck), but I do think it’s the one that had a start more apparently complex than I have faced them. The reality, fortunately, is that they have turned it around to do something very simple.
How to play Anno 1800?
Board game year 1800 It presents us with a board full of resource tiles, a bunch of colored cubes that represent the citizens and a handful of cards that will serve to move the game by inviting us to meet the demands of our population. When a player runs out of cards, a final round is played and the game is closed to count the points obtained.
creating work chains that force us to move citizens from one place to another, if one of those cards asks us to get bread, we will move a farmer to the wheat tile to put it to work, and a worker to the bread tile to produce it.
Once a card is completed, we set it aside for add up your points at the end of the game and we gain the bonus that it indicates, for example gold to spend on citizen improvements, trade points to take advantage of other players’ resources without having to produce them ourselves or, in most cases, more citizens than we allow more work to be done in the same shift.
Each new citizen obtained implies collecting a new card of its own class, so during the first bars of the game you will accumulate cards to the point of thinking that: one, you will not be able to please them all, and two, the game is going to be eternal Here comes the twist of year 1800.
Anno 1800: addictive, agile and fair
In a addictive loop focused on producing resources to be able to produce other resources and get even more resources, as the game progresses you will begin to understand that, by playing your cards well, you can create mammoth chain reactions in which you get a resource, trade with a player, complete a card, you take advantage of the bonus to get more workers and keep the cycle alive until you remove two more cards from above.
It is agile and simple -without the need to negotiate with other players, for example, you take what you want, you pay for it and so hot-, so those shifts that on paper seem like they should be eternal, in reality are a matter of seconds in which you are moving workers and tiles from here to there.
Freedom when playing also means that, depending on who you play with, you can spend two hours creating new factories until you get the most efficient city possible before the end of the game or, on the contrary, that there is someone smart enough to take advantage of the plays from the rest and burn all their cards while you are concerned with having as many citizens as possible.
Be careful, do not think that it is one of those cases in which a blue shell from Mario Kart or random luck on the board of a Mario Party handing out stars can crown a player who does not deserve it, here you have to work hard to win one of those games, and in any case it will be the final score that marks who has created the best city of all.
VidaExtra’s opinion
The fear of long instructions or an overly complex board can often derail a fun afternoon of games. The board game of year 1800 it’s the perfect example of how far family or friends can back off or start huffing and puffing while you’re explaining the mechanics. Getting over that first bump is so worth it.
It is one of those games in which, as soon as you start playing, you will already be collecting resources, completing cards and seeing firsthand how you are advancing by leaps and bounds in a matter of seconds. It has such an agile and entertaining dynamic that it is difficult not to fall for it a few minutes after starting the game.
That something so apparently complex ends up being understood quickly and without problems is, moreover, the perfect gateway to sneak in something a little more complicated the next day, so it will be difficult not to leave your first game with a smile on your ear to ear
The difficult part will come later, when it’s your turn to decide whether to present them with another game the next day or, as has happened in my house, fall back into the clutches of year 1800 one more time.
Thames & Cosmos | 680428 | Year 1800 | Board Game | Strategy Game | UbisoftEntertainment | Martin Wallace | 12 +