Initial Impression: 2010 Winsome Essen Set Part 1: West Riding Revisited

Grasp hold of your selves faithful readers. For what you are about to read is (gasp) a game related post. Except for the expansions that shipped with this set (Age of Steam: Poland, Baltimore & Ohio: Maine Lumber Expansion, and Preußische Ostbahn: Oldenburg Expansion), I have been able play through the entire 2010 Winsome Essen Set. The following are my initial thoughts and impressions on the three stand alone games that shipped with the set. I am going to do this as a 3 (or maybe 4ish) part series. I will definitely write about the base games, and I may be able to do a note on the expansions.

Let's start with West Riding Revisited. Despite some initially negative comments from American Rails designer Tim Harrison, I had high hopes for this retooling of the West Riding system. In many ways, this is a standard Winsome train game. You buy shares for companies and build track. The major tweak here is that two of the train companies in the game are not available for purchase. You can only gain shares in these companies by trading in shares of the minor companies that belong to them.

Each game round has a number of individual phases. First, each player puts a share of a minor company up for a auction. The minimum bid is that amount of money that it will take for that company to complete a link to a town/city on the board. The winner of the auction takes a share and then must build a complete link. This increases the value of the company.

Second, players have the opportunity to trade in two shares from minor companies to gain a share of the respective parent company. The only real caveat here is that the President's share of a minor company cannot change hands. (And let me say that this is a much bigger deal then I initially thought.)

Dividends are paid in the next phase. Dividends for minor companies are relatively straight forward. The total value, to be divided amongst outstanding shares, is the number of track built that turn plus the value of the locations that the company built into.

The value of the 2 major companies are equal to the number of their cubes on the board, times 10, divided amongst outstanding shares. The major companies get cubes onto the board when two of their minor companies build track into the same town. Thus, the major company gains control of that town.

This is repeated for a set number of rounds and then the game ends. The game can also end if all 6 minor companies cannot build any additional track. At this point, these is a final payoff. At this point, there are some minor tricky payoffs, but the general idea is that any money left in the company coffers is divvied out amongst the shareholders.

My thoughts? I would play it again. The game took about 2 hours to get through, which isn't terrible for a complicated train game that we were all new to. I had a terrible time trying to figure out how to do good at this game. I started with way too many Presidential shares, and had a very difficult go at trading them in for major company shares. I have read that this is a very mathematical game, but I could not even come close to valuating the different companies at auction time. I think that this was due to the layering of the share values. Each share has a value at the minor company level, but it also has a value at the major company level. The major company shares pay out more, so you are inclined to always trade in shares of the minor companies to get them.

It also seems that many of the game ideas didn't fully play out in our session. No company was every totally blocked from building track. And it also seemed to take a long time for us to start trading in minor shares for major shares. Maybe this is normal, but it took us about 5 turns to get the major shares rolling.

I will mention this again, but I think that SNCF, another game in this year's Essen set, has a similar mechanic to this one. Perhaps it's a West Riding Revisited Light. And I liked it more.

In conclusion, I was both overwhelmed and underwhelmed with this game. There seems to be a lot to this game, but I wasn't entirely excited by it. I would play it again, but it is not at the top of my list. I would like to read some other reviews and see if other people stumbled upon the same obstacles that Tim and I found in our initial play.