SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
the gameplay is as slick and well-honed, with multiple paths to victory It's been a bumper year for gaming at discount stationers The Works. Having stripped their shelves of £10 games (Metal Adventures, Apotheca, Starfighter), I went sniffing around their website and found this absolute gem.
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The premise is that, in 1899, the Victorians discover time travel and various nations send steampunk zeppelins powered by mystic crystals back in time to unearth ancient treasures and generally have adventures. You get beautiful colour dashboards representing your steam-powered airship and plastic crystals in candy-colours to power it. There are wooden airship meeples! Your ship visits different time periods each turn, where you can mine for more crystals, upgrade your vessel, undertake missions, encounter historical persons or go on mythic expeditions - but you cannot cross your own time stream so placement really matters.
Designer Rüdiger Dorn has a lot of other Euro-style worker placement games to his credit (perhaps the most well-known being Istanbul) so the gameplay is as slick and well-honed, with multiple paths to victory and lots of wheels turning within wheels. You play 5 turns then score up and it's always really close.
But I think it's Jacqui Davis' eye-popping art that lifts this game above the competition.
But I think it's Jacqui Davis' eye-popping art that lifts this game above the competition.
There's a special sort of pleasure in a well-designed worker placement game. You're building a 'victory point machine' so it's a bit like a deck-builder card game. The competition is only indirect, so there's no hard feelings and upset - but blocking each other or beating each other to a coveted resource is crucial to strategy. Some critics have grumbled that the time travel theme rather gets lost among the turning gears in this game, but not for me: this game has AIRSHIP MEEPLES.