Players: 1-4
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: [unplayed]
Age: 14+
Playtime: 60-150 min
Complexity: 8.5/10
While Professor Lativ’s wondrous invention is successful in controlling local weather phenomena, the machine also causes extreme “butterfly effect” disruptions elsewhere. There is much to do!
A new game by Vital Lacerda is a yearly cause for celebration within my gaming group. The Lisbon-born (Lisborn?) designer has a knack for coming up with heavy games that play like a massive, well-oiled clock: each element interacts superbly with everything else, and all you need to do is figure out how best to pull the levers at your disposal in order to achieve a resounding success.
Ha.
In Weather Machine, players secure government subsidies, expand their workshops, run experiments using Professor Lativ’s machine, build new prototypes to fix the screw-ups caused by those experiments, publish their findings in academic papers, and build cute little robots to help them do it all. (You can even quote previous papers on the same topic to help get yours published. How about that?)
As you can expect with Lacerda, the design reuses some of his mechanical darlings while injecting novelty in other areas. Overall, the game is not that difficult… but it’s a real challenge to learn, and even worse to teach. (God help me.) Hence my 8.5 complexity rating. All I can say is, don’t give up: the end result is well worth the effort. There’s a special satisfaction to be found in seeing all those intricate mechanics come together and WORK. Plus the little gears (even the cardboard ones—I think the metal upgrades are overkill) are just a joy to play with, and the entire package is gorgeous.
For the Lacerda fans out there, Weather Machine feels to me closest to Kanban out of all his previous designs—if that can help push you off the fence.
Sadly I cannot comment on the solitaire module provided with the game, as I have not had a chance to play it yet. But it’s pretty intricate and not for the faint of heart.
Most easily forgotten rule: When you build the prototype (in the R&D department), all of the gears you use must come from the same row in your workshop.
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Players: 1-4
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: Good
Age: 12+
Playtime: 75-150 min
Complexity: 8/10
Just a few weeks ago, I wrote a flash review of the excellent second edition of Great Western Trail, the original version of which had earned first prize in my Top 10 for 2016.
Now comes a new setting with slightly modified mechanics, and I’m falling in love all over again.
This time around, you’re driving cattle in Argentina, intent on getting those cows aboard ships bound for Europe. Once again, the board depicts the land players need to traverse on their way to Buenos Aires, with buildings that offer new actions as well as some familiar ones, and farmers instead of bandits. Incidentally, players can help those farmers if they have sufficient strength (a new resource) on their cattle cards and player boards; in return, farmers can be enlisted as workers to help supply the players with grain.
Grain is also a new resource: whereas in GWT you pay money to ship cattle to faraway cities, now you need to pay grain to load them onto ships (placing one of your discs on the ship you selected). At regular intervals, groups of ships depart for Europe, carrying with them player discs they’ll drop in three major ports. From that point on, whenever you’re shipping cows, you can also perform an “extra delivery”—provided you can pay for it in grain—that reuses one of your discs now in Europe, for a juicy bonus in points or pesos.
GWT Argentina is certainly different from its older sibling, but not different enough to warrant owning both versions of the game, unless you’re a GWT maniac. But if you enjoy the original, I can’t imagine you wouldn’t like this new spin on the same robust system. (I just wish the enclosed plastic tray was usable; as it stands you can’t even keep it if you aspire to put everything back in the box at the end of the game.)
The solo module introduces Pedro, a bot with its own cards and little player board who plays against you. Pedro can operate according to three different difficulty settings; either way, you'll soon learn to hate him (in a good way!).
After a few plays, I think Argentina is superior to the classic version, but I’m not ready to get rid of my beloved GWT just yet. What I am ready for, though, is the final title in the trilogy, coming out sometime in 2023—Great Western Trail: New Zealand.
Can’t wait to start herding those wild kiwis. Hee haw!
Most easily forgotten rule: If you have exhaustion cards in your hand when you reach Buenos Aires, you remove them entirely from your deck—you don’t just discard them.
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Players: 1-6
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: Outstanding
Age: 10+
Playtime: 30-60 min
Complexity: 5/10
It’s Formula 1 racing in the ‘60s, and you’re at the wheel of a powerful machine barrelling down the speedway. Everywhere you look, the track is filled with brightly colored cars. But hey, what’s one more hairpin turn at breakneck speed?
Heat comes with four different race tracks, six cute little cars and a deck of speed cards for every player, with each card showing a different speed—from 0 all the way to 5. The basic game couldn’t be simpler: shift up or down into the gear you want, play that many cards (from 1 to 4), and move your car as far as it’ll go without getting blocked. If you negotiate a corner during your move, check your speed (total value of the cards you played) against the corner’s speed limit, and pay 1 heat card for each speed increment over that limit.
(You’re rounding a 3-corner at speed 7? That just cost you four heat cards.)
Those heat cards start on your player board and represent your engine’s capabilities to “give a little more.” You begin the game with six, and gradually move them (“spend” them) to your discard pile to move faster or reach a gear you couldn’t normally shift into, in addition to overshooting corners as described above.
You’ll want to rid your deck of heat cards for two reasons: because those become clutter in your hand (possibly causing an overheat situation where your car doesn’t move at all for a turn) but also because if you no longer have heat cards on your player board, you can’t ask your engine for that extra kick you just needed to pass that green bastard on the straightaway. So make sure you shift down to gear 1 or 2 once in a while: those let you discard heat cards back to your player board. (And if you can time that with slowing down for a difficult corner, all the better!)
The game also features a solo mode where the flip of a single card drives all of the pilotless cars (from one to all 6, which means you could just watch the race unfold if you feel particularly lazy one evening). And they’re competitive, too! So much so that there’s no reason not to use a full complement of cars on the track, no matter the number of human players. Even the solo races are proving fun and tense, which is no small achievement.
And there are more options to explore: the garage module (customize your car!), the weather module (you afraid of a little snow at 290 km/h?), and the championship system (one race isn’t the whole story…).
I’m a big racing game fan, and Heat just might make it all the way to the top of my list. It manages to strike a death-defying balance between simplicity, meaningful decisions and excitement, all the while making the whole thing feel like a race. I can’t recommend it enough.
Most easily forgotten rule: You can decide to use adrenaline before or after you boost.
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