Recently played: Roads & Boats
Apr. 6th, 2009 14:10![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
viktor_haagOn the weekend, by special request, we put Roads & Boats on the table. R&B feels a lot like what happens when you get a bunch of hard-core 18xx players together, introduce them to Settlers of Catan, and then ask them to "improve" it in any way they'd like. What you end up with might be a four-hour long, bootstrap-your-economy type game that involves building infrastructure to generate resources, get more resources, spend them on buildings, and over the course of the game set yourself up to get lots of points (because points mean prizes).
There were three of us, the other two being familiar with the game, and the owner of the game specifically chose a scenario that left lots of room for development with not too much interaction. As a result, the remainder of the game was pretty much an exercise in building up one's own economy, and reasonable attempts at carefully timed spending of resources in order to scoop regular points out of the "wonder track" (a mechanism I've seen in other building games of this sort where people can spend resources on their own infrastructure to ultimately get points, or contributing to a common "infrastructure" for a share of commonly available points).
As with a difference between Railroad Tycoon and Age of Steam, Roads & Boats has no real "negative" force through the game. Accordingly, you may think you're doing reasonably all right, when in fact, you're doing very poorly, because all the other players are doing reasonably all right at a much faster clip than you are.
As with most of these sorts of bootstrappy economic games I've played, the end-game also has a tendency to accelerate. At the start of the game, you're really scraping by to get your resource economy off the ground; once you have it working well, though, you have more and more resources generated, and then it's a matter of spending things wisely. As is also traditional with these kinds of games, the gap between the rich and poor widens considerably as the game progresses, because the poor choices you make early on accumulate and it's very difficult to make up for them (rather like the small movement of the tiller at the beginning of the journey that puts your boat far off course when you reach the other side of the lake).
Roads & Boats has loads and loads of play value. The base game comes with a number of boardconfigurations for you to try, it uses a hex-tile terrain system that's sort of like Settlers, so the board can always look different. And the scale of the economy involved is rather like Settlers on steroids (with Settlers, you build roads, so you can build houses, so you can build cities--with this game, the number of different things you have to build, in particular order, to get the big-scoring developments at the end of the game is almost an order of magnitude more complex). That said, Roads & Boats is long (four to five hours is not an exaggeration, probably three to four hours for those who play regularly), and it is expensive (my local game store just got in some copies for 125.00 CDN); it is also reasonably collectible, because it's published by a small press (the same folks who brought us Antiquity and Indonesia), and in the periods when it is not available, people tend to pay silly prices to get ahold of a copy.
Should you buy this game?
I would give a very qualified "yes".
For you to get your money's worth out of it, you should have a regular group of players who will happily make time to play this game on a semi-regular basis. These kinds of games really shine when played regularly by a group of players that all have similar amounts of expertise with the game. But I just can't see myself regularly wanting to set aside four hours for Roads & Boats to make the purchase worthwhile, especially when I know that two of the people I'm most liable to play it with near me also, already, have copies.
If you like Agricola, Le Havre, Antiquity, Scepter of Zavandor (or Outpost), Through The Ages, and other sorts of longer, crunchier games, where you start out with a very small pool of resources and must build an economic engine up for the whole game, then you might very well quite like Roads & Boats. But most of those games can be had for half the price as Roads & Boats, and/or be played in half the time.
If someone asked me specifically to play the game, and I had a whole afternoon free, I'd be happy to. But, on the whole, there are a short list of games I'd prefer to play (some of which I already own) that would give me a similar feel, so I just can't countenance adding this game to my collection at this point.
Roads & Boats is a very good game, and for the right group would be an excellent purchase. There's more than enough meat in this game to provide you with your money's worth and fill lots and lots of afternoons (or late evenings) with fun.
There were three of us, the other two being familiar with the game, and the owner of the game specifically chose a scenario that left lots of room for development with not too much interaction. As a result, the remainder of the game was pretty much an exercise in building up one's own economy, and reasonable attempts at carefully timed spending of resources in order to scoop regular points out of the "wonder track" (a mechanism I've seen in other building games of this sort where people can spend resources on their own infrastructure to ultimately get points, or contributing to a common "infrastructure" for a share of commonly available points).
As with a difference between Railroad Tycoon and Age of Steam, Roads & Boats has no real "negative" force through the game. Accordingly, you may think you're doing reasonably all right, when in fact, you're doing very poorly, because all the other players are doing reasonably all right at a much faster clip than you are.
As with most of these sorts of bootstrappy economic games I've played, the end-game also has a tendency to accelerate. At the start of the game, you're really scraping by to get your resource economy off the ground; once you have it working well, though, you have more and more resources generated, and then it's a matter of spending things wisely. As is also traditional with these kinds of games, the gap between the rich and poor widens considerably as the game progresses, because the poor choices you make early on accumulate and it's very difficult to make up for them (rather like the small movement of the tiller at the beginning of the journey that puts your boat far off course when you reach the other side of the lake).
Roads & Boats has loads and loads of play value. The base game comes with a number of boardconfigurations for you to try, it uses a hex-tile terrain system that's sort of like Settlers, so the board can always look different. And the scale of the economy involved is rather like Settlers on steroids (with Settlers, you build roads, so you can build houses, so you can build cities--with this game, the number of different things you have to build, in particular order, to get the big-scoring developments at the end of the game is almost an order of magnitude more complex). That said, Roads & Boats is long (four to five hours is not an exaggeration, probably three to four hours for those who play regularly), and it is expensive (my local game store just got in some copies for 125.00 CDN); it is also reasonably collectible, because it's published by a small press (the same folks who brought us Antiquity and Indonesia), and in the periods when it is not available, people tend to pay silly prices to get ahold of a copy.
Should you buy this game?
I would give a very qualified "yes".
For you to get your money's worth out of it, you should have a regular group of players who will happily make time to play this game on a semi-regular basis. These kinds of games really shine when played regularly by a group of players that all have similar amounts of expertise with the game. But I just can't see myself regularly wanting to set aside four hours for Roads & Boats to make the purchase worthwhile, especially when I know that two of the people I'm most liable to play it with near me also, already, have copies.
If you like Agricola, Le Havre, Antiquity, Scepter of Zavandor (or Outpost), Through The Ages, and other sorts of longer, crunchier games, where you start out with a very small pool of resources and must build an economic engine up for the whole game, then you might very well quite like Roads & Boats. But most of those games can be had for half the price as Roads & Boats, and/or be played in half the time.
If someone asked me specifically to play the game, and I had a whole afternoon free, I'd be happy to. But, on the whole, there are a short list of games I'd prefer to play (some of which I already own) that would give me a similar feel, so I just can't countenance adding this game to my collection at this point.
Roads & Boats is a very good game, and for the right group would be an excellent purchase. There's more than enough meat in this game to provide you with your money's worth and fill lots and lots of afternoons (or late evenings) with fun.
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no subject
Date: 2009-04-07 19:49 (UTC)Top 10
1. Bridge
2. Civilization (Tresham's original, not Advanced Civ, or anything by Sid Meier)
3. Puerto Rico
4. Indonesia
5. Age Of Steam
6. Power Grid
7. Union Pacific
8. DIplomacy
9. Agricola
10. Settlers of Catan
At this point, the games in slot #7 and #10 could probably stand to be replaced, but I haven't played their likely replacements enough to really push for it.
It's entirely likely that 1825 (Tresham's game broken into Units and kits) would go in the #7 slot.
It's also entirely likely that the Commands and Colours system (represented by BattleLore and C&C:Ancients) or the Combat Commander system could go in the #10 slot; the only reason Settlers is there is pretty much as a nod to the "ur-German Style Game", in which case, it probably deserves to be #11 or an honourable mention, and not occupy an actual slot on the list.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-07 22:01 (UTC)Your's is definitely crunchier and longer play times on average than my likely choices. I have a soft spot for Civilization and Diplomacy, but don't really see any chance of playing them again in the next few years. I don't rate Settlers that highly any more. Other games have overtaken it in game balance and quality of play experience. I've never seen the point of Bridge, unfortunately. Agricola is on my to-play list.
Puerto Rico would still make my top ten, I think. Race for the Galaxy is working its way on to the list too. But after that I'm unsure of what I'd pick.