It’s the hand size battle that keeps the tension in place. Do you add more population to allow for more efficient turns prior to celebrating a festival? More cards mean more potential points. But it also means more time before you can trigger end game. Plus, there’s the decision to upgrade workforce roles into higher specializations that in turn limit what’s available to utilize for more basic operations, such as your farmers or your workers. This decision space is key to game enjoyment and the puzzle shifts based on objectives and population needs. One would assume that I am being critical here. Trust me, I am not. I absolutely adore how simple this system is. It actually feels good, from turn to turn, to ‌look at the number of cubes (population, in the game’s parlance) in your supply and know what you can do with your hand of cards. But what if you don’t have the right Industry Tiles on your Island to complete a card? What if you can’t Expand to get new Tiles onto your Island? If only there was a way to- (oh, wait, there is)! Let’s Make A Trade So the basic principles are to allocate your workers to tiles to produce goods that advance your situation. This can be achieved in a number of ways.

For a good stretch of 2021, everyone was talking about Anno 1800, the board game based on the video game from Ubisoft.A Eurogame to its core, Anno 1800 works so well for me because it does all the things you can expect, but with a couple of gameplay processes that bring me joy. Pass actions that don’t necessarily hurt, no set round structure, a wide variety of public goals available in each game, and lots of ways to score but with one main scoring mechanism which also triggers the final round.

Anno 1800 offers a lot of fun, even though sometimes it may feel like you are just another machine in the middle of all this industrial production that is going on. It has not the same depth of other 2-hour games, what can be good or bad depending on your playstyle. The art is not the greatest, but the components quality is fair enough, even though workers are as simple as coloured cubes. All in all, it is a game worth playing, but it is just not there yet to be another Marin Wallace’s masterpiece.Even better? Trading in Anno 1800. It’s so simple, so friendly, and it makes so much sense. You’ll start the game with a couple of trade tokens, which can be used (whoops, “exhausted”) to get goods from another player who makes the thing you want. They get a small compensation, in the form of gold, to give you access to whatever good you need in a trade that can’t be refused. Wallace says he designed the expansion as a “gamer’s game” that “bumps the complexity level up, but really reduces the amount of randomness in the game.” Many months, as it turned out. The first two people in my gaming network who got the game paid extra to import their copies from game stores in Europe, and those copies featured German rulebooks! Flavor text? None in sight. Each card has a pleasant-looking picture of a person on it and a bunch of symbols.

By now you know that completing Population Cards is key to success in Anno. But what if the cards in your hand are impossible to attempt right now? Fortunate, then: the final action you could consider is swapping up to three Population Cards from your hand. You have to swap like-for-like (so you can’t swap Expedition Cards for green/blue Population Cards. Nor can you swap blue/green Population Cards for red/purple/green ones.). Hope you draw better cards! The End-Game Trigger: Final Scoring I like the breadth of options for each player. This means there is no one sure way to victory or even a guaranteed fastest route for each project you initiate. It also adds significant replayability to the game.

Stay as Long as You’d Like

Get aboard this unique expedition to the new world! Gather your crew and inspire your villagers to become the most prospering nation. In Anno 1800, you must develop your land, making it prosper and thrive by producing and trading goods to satisfy all your population’s needs. But be aware: too much of a promised land may be overwhelming, and your workforce may run out of control without access to the goods they want. What happened to Kev is what happens to a lot of first-time players of Anno 1800: they spend too much time building up their engine, instead of just speeding towards the ending by fulfilling their hand of cards.

Expansion is analogous to industrialization, where you can build new factories in your land, giving you access to new products to keep pushing your development and satisfying your population needs. There is an enormous variety of factories to be built, what can be a little overwhelming in the first sight, but you don’t need to be able to produce all of it by yourself. I mentioned that you can trade, which is the way you can get the resources you are missing to make an upgrade or add a new tile. The requirements are that someone else produces the necessary goods and you have sufficient trade goods to carry out the trade. These come from having enough trade tokens on your trade ships, so more planning is required to make sure that these are available when needed and you have enough ships. You complete Population Cards by providing the stated resources on the card. You can provide them by sending you workers to produce the goods on your own island, if you have the respective factory tile. Or, if an opponent has that factory, you can spend a trade token to gain that resource. (The other player earns some gold in return, so everyone’s happy!) Of course, you can’t afford to trade too often, so you’ll have to build your own factories. So long as you have enough room on your island to house all those new industries… The main mechanism during players’ actions of Anno 1800 is placing your workers in your factories to produce the goods you need either to build a new factory or to play one of your population cards and claim its rewards. You have five different types of workers: Farmers, Workers, Artisans, Engineers, and Investors, each being needed to produce different goods. They are associated with different population cards, being Farmers and Works the basic one, Artisans, Engineers and Investors the advanced one, and New World cards lie somewhere in between them. Being efficient in worker allocation is key in the game, as well as finding the balance between getting new workers and upgrading them. While new workers increase the number of actions you can take before needing to reset your board, they come along with population cards, getting you further from the end-game condition (or even giving you negative points depending on the objectives that are in play), upgrading your workers don’t give you new cards, just letting you redistribute your workforce as your nation progress. Remember those three ships you started with? Two of them have Trade Tokens on them. You can take advantage of another player who has built the Industry Tile you need. You don’t ‘visit their Island’, nor need to send a Population Cube their way. But you do pay attention to the colour of cube needed. You pay a cost in Trade Tokens in accordance to the Industry’s colour.

If you’ve heard anything about Anno 1800, I’m sure it’s the main tile display, a massive headache that is tough to set up because each of the 35 (!!) different industry tiles has exactly one match, and one space it has to sit on, and the storage solution isn’t ideal between plays. (By “storage solution”, I mean “empty cardboard box.”) My buddy Kev told me about his first play of Anno 1800, on Tabletopia. It sounded like it took forever. That’s because it did: 3 hours for his first 2-player game. Beyond this, I do find the theme to be a little tired, even if it is directly based on a PC game and is trying its best to be faithful to this. Regardless of the spin on trying to keep your population happy by meeting their needs, this is a primarily white European nation expanding into new worlds where only then does diversity start to creep into the cards. As a fictional historical exercise, it doesn’t take much to inject diversity from the outset and shift the narrative away from potential comparisons in this realm. Even the exploration tokens feature crossed swords rather than a spyglass or compass, another hint at expansion at a cost. Objective cards provide direction for final scoring and are randomized at the start of each game. But you can only get the special buildings with development points, so you have to go to Enbesa, the place that gives you these.” The game ends once someone play their final Population Card. Anno 1800 provides so many different paths to take, and no two strategies are alike!