Capstone Games Pipeline Board Game

Product Information

Unable to keep up with demand, the government has only one option: privatizing the oil industry. This is where you come in. It doesn’t have a published solo set of rules. However, an excellent automa has been created by John Koch Oil Spill: A game of strategy and environmental impact. Photographed May 20, 2021. (Anne Raup / ADN)

The gameplay is quite deep. Every game the valuations (end game scoring) are different every game, meaning what works one game will not work so well the next. If you don’t aim to fulfil at least one of these, you could be in trouble come end game scoring.The first wave of what a modern toy aisle shopper might recognize as a board game arrived in 1897. A bumper crop of Klondike Gold Rush games appeared on store shelves across the country with a speed that matched the rush for the goldfields. While roughly 100,000 individuals set out for the Klondike from 1896 to 1999, many times that number eagerly consumed any news or product connected to the gold fever sensation. In other words, the Klondike Gold Rush was a fad, and like any modern fad, there were fortunes to be made with tie-ins. The player's task is to rearrange and rotate the pipe segments to create a path from a starting point to an endpoint. The path must be a continuous connection, allowing the liquid or gas to flow through without any leaks. As the game progresses, the difficulty increases, with more complex pipe configurations and limited time or moves to complete the puzzle. The higher the grade, the more the oil is worth but also the more pipe you’ll need. You’ll often have to decide between selling some low-grade oil to make improvements, or holding out a little longer and selling some high-grade oil for more money. Of course, everyone else is doing the same thing and if you wait too long, the thing you wanted to buy may no longer be there! Pipeline is definitely one of my favorite games of this year and will have a spot on my mid-weight euro shelf for years to come. It’s a lovely puzzle of making the most of your actions with just the right amount of player interaction (which the exception of that whole upgrade thing.) This is where you come in. Seeking to capitalize on this new opportunity, in Pipeline you start a company in the oil business. You will focus on building a much more efficient pipeline network in your refinery, hiring experts that provide valuable benefits over your competitors, and managing the logistics of purchasing and selling your refined oil in the various markets. You will need more than strong economic skills – carefully crafting an interweaving network of pipelines just might ensure your victory!

Tanks - These are used to store the oil you buy and refine. Each player has a player board on which to arrange their refinery and these can sometimes be worth money at the end of the game. Part of a continuing weekly series on local history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story.The game is blatantly pro-pipeline propaganda. Players are dealt cards from four suits: anti-pipeline “objections,” pro-pipeline “facts,” pro-oil trivia, and public impact cards. The game mechanics are a slightly more complicated version of hearts. A professor delivers the facts, but the objections feature a caricature of a nosy older woman, her tiny hat topped by a flower. On one of her cards, she holds a sign stating, “Objection for objection’s sake.” One of the pro-oil trivia cards declares, “the dinosaur died for nothing” if gas stations closed. The valuation cards in Pipeline give every game its own flavor and the combinations are close enough to endless that I think it will be difficult, if not impossible, to ever come to a point where you can define “the best” strategy. Of course, the nostalgia for the gold rush is still well represented in modern Alaska board games, including the 1991 Alaskan Gold Rush, 1992 Klondike: Trivia Game on the Yukon, 2014 Lost Valley: The Yukon Gold Rush 1896, and the 2017 Klondike Rush. How does this work? Well, there are 3 varieties of oil in the game (Teal, Orange, Silver) that correspond to the 3 colours of pipe, and 4 grades of oil (Crude, Low, Medium, High). During setup, you will randomly assign the length of pipe needed to refine oil from one level to the next.

Oil is not the only thing you’ll need. Pipelines are important too. They come in three colours; each refining oil barrels of the same colour. Amazingly each of the 130+ tiles are unique, which presents you with an interesting spacial puzzle. Each oil colour will require different lengths of pipe to be refined from each stage to the next (crude - low grade - mid grade - high grade). Do you build big in one colour so you can refine a barrel all the way from crude to high grade, or multiple pipelines that can refine multiple barrels at once? You will need more than strong economic skills – carefully crafting an interweaving network of pipelines just might ensure your victory! Solo Variant We are only halfway through, but 2019 is shaping up to be one of the better years for new board game releases in recent memory. Today we are looking at one of the games that is leading that charge, Pipeline, which sold out at Origins 2019 and finished atop the BGG hotness at the convention.It’s wonderfully tactile and interactive throughout, with players constantly competing to sell and buy everything first. It’s also brilliant at all player counts (thanks to some simple tweaks to the markets) and doesn’t take too long to play once everyone is familiar with the mechanics. You will focus on building a much more efficient pipeline network in your refinery, hiring experts that provide valuable benefits over your competitors, and managing the logistics of purchasing and selling your refined oil in the various markets.