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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… Plenty of games claim to offer a ‘sandbox’ experience, but very few truly deliver it. Having set victory conditions and round structure in a game will always mean it’s on-rails to some extent. This creates a problem when trying to recreate a sandbox-style game – a game just like the Anno series. Martin Wallace has done a great job in being able to capture the open-ended feel of Anno 1800, and creating a board game which feels familiar.
When was the last time I took time during a game to read the flavor text on a card? Ooof, a few years ago? I play games semi-professionally and never read cards for anything more than the iconography I need to push through. In this way, Anno 1800 just admits the truth: I’m trying to play, not stare lovingly into the eyes of card flavor text. 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 WorkforceAnno 1800 started out life as a computer game by Ubisoft. Here it’s received the wood-and-cardboard treatment by respected designer Martin Wallace and Kosmos Games. In Anno 1800, 2-4 players compete in a world of trade, discovery and exploration. Who will keep their population the happiest? I have enjoyed my plays of this so far, and I can definitely see the appeal that this will have for those who like longer and more complex games. It will also appeal to those who have like civ-building games as it has a similar feel. For me, I loved the first hour or so, but then as the game ground on, it moved down into the “I like it” territory as I felt it went on a bit longer than I would have liked. Again, this may be more my personal preference towards games under two hours as the pacing of the game seems to work fine for what it wants to do. I’d definitely still play it again if asked.
Anno 1800, by Kosmos Games, has foundations via a computer game by Ubisoft. Designer Martin Wallace, of ‘Brass’ fame, is the maestro behind this board game translation. If you’re a Brass: Birmingham fan, you’re going to enjoy Anno 1800! Like many of these games, to look at Anno set up on the table, it might appear intimidating. Daunting, even. But is it that complex to grasp? Not with a Zatu ‘How To Play’ guide, it’s not! So let’s dive straight in, starting with the most important part of any rules teach… How do I win? First Things’s First: What Are We Doing? How Do I Win? 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. Wallace says the regions are interlinked and will add new resource-generating buildings to the game. They’ve also been designed to introduce subtle gameplay changes that shake up the pace and strategies that you might encounter as you play. 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. 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!
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.
Designed by Martin Wallace (the Brass games, Age of Steam, Tinner’s Trail) and published by KOSMOS ( The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, Cascadia), Anno 1800 was a hit right out of the gate. This was certainly due, in part, to the pedigree of the team behind the game, but getting a copy of Anno 1800 took months. Final Score: 3.5 stars – Fun trade and industry growth pathways combined with population needs are hampered by overused theme and balance issues. 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.
Paid the cost? Take that tinned food factory. Flip it over, and place it onto your Island board. You can place it into an empty space (such as next to your Shipyard). Or, you can overbuild it on top of another Industry that you don’t feel you need any more, if space is tight. Now you have access to producing tinned food (via a blue ‘worker’ Population Cube). In later turns, you might visit here because other Industries demand tinned food as their blueprints. Or, because you have a Population Card with that particular demand… Play (And Activate) A Population Card
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