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Welcome To The Dawn Of The Industrial Age
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.
Anno 1800 is a game for 2 to 4 players by Martin Wallace and is based on the acclaimed UbiSoft video-game with the same name. The objective of the game is to score the most points while getting rid of all your population cards by satisfying their needs, triggering the end game. To achieve it, you will develop your island through expansion, trade, exploration, and social ascension. When a player plays the last population card from their hand, the game end is triggered, and players finish the current turn and play a last one before final scoring. Players score points for every card played (ranging from 3 to 8 points based on its type), for every objective fulfilled in their expedition cards, for their gold reserves, for the five common objective cards present in the game and 7 bonus points for the player who first played all her cards.
Everybody To The Factories
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.
Expansion is analogous to industrialization, where you can build new factories in your land, giving you access to new products to keep pushing your development and satisfying your population needs. There is an enormous variety of factories to be built, what can be a little overwhelming in the first sight, but you don’t need to be able to produce all of it by yourself.
That is when trade takes place. You can use your trade tokens, obtained from your trade ships, to trade resources with other players. They cannot refuse it, and they get a piece of gold in exchange, which is useful to pay your workers’ overtime (calling someone back from a factory to have them available again to another action). It is when the players’ interaction takes place and makes this game better with higher player count.
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.
Other Anno 1800 game actions let you attract new workers to your nation, promote them to higher societal tiers (there are five in total and more specialized products need more specialized and more expensive workforce), change cards in your hand, meaning your population’s needs changed, and celebrate a festival to call all your workers back and get your ships ready to sail once again.
The Wealth In The Game
The 20 different objective cards present in the game give enough replayability from one game to another, changing the focus each time and ensuring you cannot stick to a single strategy each and every game. Moreover, the variability present on the population cards will also dictate which direction you will take in terms of industry development, trying to explore as many synergies in your card as you can. To make it fairer, the swap population cards let you mitigate a little bit of that randomness, letting you get rid of your most anti-synergic cards. There are also some popular (unofficial) game variants on BGG forums that try to mitigate unfair open plays due to an excessively good starting hand and give a first-move advantage to whoever builds a new factory.
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.
Anno 1800 offers a lot of fun, even though sometimes it may feel like you are just another machine in the middle of all this industrial production that is going on. It has not the same depth of other 2-hour games, what can be good or bad depending on your playstyle. The art is not the greatest, but the components quality is fair enough, even though workers are as simple as coloured cubes. All in all, it is a game worth playing, but it is just not there yet to be another Marin Wallace’s masterpiece.
That concludes our thoughts on Anno 1800. Do you agree? Let us know your thoughts and tag us on social media @zatugames. To buy Anno 1800 today click here!
