Most of the time, what your opponent does while you're trying to line up those ducks is irrelevant, especially in a two-player game since you can always acquire whatever building you want, assuming that you have the proper items to input for it.
The more "old world" locations you want to add, the more exploration tokens you need, which means you need warships, which means you need larger shipyards, which means you need to get engineers or investors on your island, which means you need to "upgrade" existing residents or attract new people, each of whom will come with their own card.Īs you can see, you need to chain together many tiny turns in order to get things done. You have a limited amount of space on your island, so you can either replace existing buildings with new ones - possibly removing your ability to easily get sails or coal - or expand your island by visiting other places in the "old world", i.e. Supply a steam carriage or advanced weaponry? Get 1 gold! I'm not a dedicated student of economics, but even I understand that system is out of whack. If you don't have the ability to create something needed, which can easily happen in games with three or four players since only two of each production building are available, you can use trade tokens to acquire the good from someone else, with them receiving 1 gold in return. that you then immediately convert into a new production building or a satisfied person. In general, players take dozens of tiny turns over the course of play, with most actions consisting of you placing people on the appropriately colored buildings on your island to get stuff - e.g., wood, coal, steel, pigs, the aforementioned rum, etc.
Each new person you add to your island comes with an associated card, which is both blessing and bane because you can score points and get stuff by satisfying that person, but you can also find yourself in need of a fur coat, rum, or a gramophone for some entitled doofus that's now burdening your hand and it can be a pain in the butt to chase down such things. You start with nine cards in hand to match your nine starting people, but if you look at that image, you'll see that I have eleven cards in hand, despite a decent stack of played population cards being on the table in front of me. The guy in the image below, for example, wants sausage and schnapps, and in return he'll lure a new artisan to my island. For each person on your island - which starts with four green farmers, three blue workers, and two red artisans - you have a card in hand that at top shows their needs and at bottom shows what they'll grant you should you satisfy those needs.
Your goal in Anno 1800 is to have more points than others, and you score points primarily by satisfying the needs of people on your island and completing public objectives.
This design adapts the real-time, city-building video game from Ubisoft for play on the tabletop, but I am not familiar with that video game - or pretty much any video game - so I'll comment only on the board game. You could think that the slow delivery was due to KOSMOS be thematic and reverting to how production and distribution worked in the year 1800, but that would be a stretch. The board game Anno 1800 from designer Martin Wallace and publisher KOSMOS debuted in Germany in October 2020, and following a year of turbulent manufacturing and shipping issues, copies are now available in English on the U.S.