Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
There’s no getting around it, however the setup is a bear. Enough of a bear that there have already been times when preparing this review where I looked at the box and had to ask myself if I wanted to set it up by myself. That’s important when games are fighting the mental hurdle for table time; some games give me the punch of a fun experience without the headache of a difficult setup/teardown. 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.”) 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. For those, like me, who played the digital game before, two of its characteristics are very well represented in the board game. First, the production trees, creating a real feeling of a supply chain, where basic goods are more abundant and necessary to build intermediate and advanced ones, which also requires specialized workforce. Moreover, those products are related to the population needs, with increasing demands as your population demographics progresses. Secondly, the dynamics of the society, with more prosperity meaning increasing population which translates in higher demand is very well reproduced by the worker cards. Wallace says the expansion has also been designed to respond to some criticisms made of Anno 1800, including the limited use of certain resources. An additional set of cards included in the expansion, which sit as a pool on the table rather than in players’ hands, grant you additional actions in return for mid-level resources that previously had little utility.
Once any player has fulfilled all their population cards, the game ends after the current round plus one additional full round are completed. Points come from completed population cards, expedition cards (gained by exploring the new world), leftover gold, and objective cards. The player who empties their hand first also receives a seven-point fireworks token to add to their final score. The player with the most points is the winner. The main board is an eyeful but gets easier to distinguish over time. Game Experience: 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. Flavor text? None in sight. Each card has a pleasant-looking picture of a person on it and a bunch of symbols.Simon Neale : I’m afraid that I find this game overlong and tiresome. There is only so much of chaining “this to do that, to then do this, which then enables me to do that” I can take before I become bored with the whole process. I realise that some players really enjoy spending hours creating the ultimate chain of actions, it’s just I am not one of them. Splendor provides this experience but in a superbly streamlined form. Tiles have a cost on that purple blueprint bar. To claim the tile, move your Population Cube(s) to the corresponding Industry Tiles on your Island Board. The core game plays exactly the same way,” Wallace says about the add-on. “So it’s pretty easy to integrate the expansion into the main game; you’re not having to take things out of it.” You can also ‘explore’ and extend your own island, or discover the new world. To explore, you’ll need ships. So you can build shipyards, and ships, too! As well as trying to complete your own Population Cards, you’ll be competing with your opponents for communal end-game goal cards. There’s a lot of these that come with the game, so you’ll get a modular feel, every time. Talking about ships, you also have exploration ships, which give you access to exploration tokens. They are used to explore the Old World and the New World tiles, giving you access to more land to expand into, exotic resources to work with and native population to join your nation. They can also be used to get exploration cards that give you bonus points at the end of the game.
I like the limited number (2) of each new industry tile that can be acquired as this forces the pace, but also means that you can or need to trade your way out of a problem. Of course this means developing your trade side too. So the game interconnects many aspects and this means more puzzles to solve, which is good. The irony is you have to send Population Cubes to destinations to earn more of them. It’s often a smart move, long-term though, because this grants you a lot more flexibility as the game progresses. You can increase up to three new Population Cubes per turn using this action. Every time you earn a single cube, you gain a Population Card matching its colour. A new islander, a new dream card. More work… but more potential points! Upgrade The Workforce When I first heard that there was going to be a cardboard version of Anno 1800, I was equal parts excited and skeptical. I’ve see far too many terrible adaptations from one form of media to another to not assume the worst. Having Martin Wallace’s name on the box helped ease that worry though, as he’s responsible for some of the greatest games ever made ( Brass: Birmingham, London, A Few Acres of Snow among others). Some of the things you do in the Anno games seem like a natural fit for a board game, like generating resources, and building. The exploration and expansion, not so much. Buildings and shipyards on a player’s board But mostly, you are going to be working on your engine, to produce the right stuff to get those cards out of your hand. You can work at your own pace, until you can’t, because your neighbor just emptied her last 5 cards in the blink of an eye thanks to a daisy chain of actions. 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.Much of the game is focused on industry expansion. Players utilize their workforce to produce goods that add new construction tokens to their island board. Sending a farmer to produce pigs, while sending an artisan to produce coal, is an easy way to add a sausage factory to your island. A player may want this industry to fulfill the resource need on one of their population cards. Expanding can happen immediately based on the starting workforce loadout and there are plenty of pathways to fulfill population needs as well as expand into even greater industry.
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