OUR REVIEW

BULDING AND PRODUCTION IN THE BAVARIAN FOREST

Die GlasstraSSe

Glass And Bricks for many a building

In 2012 the newcomer, publisher Feuerland Spiele, made gamers sit up with the first published game. Terra Mystica has become a favored hit for experienced frequent players. Expectations on the second game, published in 2013, were accordingly high, especially since the game was a design by widely known Uwe Rosenberg. One of the characteristics of a game by Uwe Rosenberg, this game, too, features a lot of components which are only partially used in a game and also some mechanisms that are characteristic for Uwe Rosenberg games. But in contrast to some of his other games Die Glasstraße is not entirely predictable, unexpected things keep happening and the game thrives on its variability. On the downside, planning ability suffers from this variety, which might reduce the allure of Die Glasstraße for some experienced players. In any case, the game is not really comparable to Terra Mystica.

We find ourselves in the Bavarian Forest, Bayrischer Wald, and manufacture glass and bricks from various resources, which was a flourishing business far into the 20^th century. Each player has his own board, his landscape board, on which he places his buildings during the game. At the start the board is equipped with three start-up buildings and nearly all empty slots are filled with landscape tiles like forest, groves, ponds and pits. This start-up layout is identical for all players at the start of the game.

During all the game, in the various periods for building, the goal is to construct/build building tiles and collect victory points with them. Buildings do not come out of the blue, however, they can only be built with suitable resources. Luckily, each player can hire specialists for this purpose who provide him with the necessary resources or make the necessary abilities for construction available.

The game is divided into four building periods. Within those building periods buildings are offered for construction on a separate building board, 12 or 15 of them, depending on the number of players. All buildings in the game are unique, no building is available several times. All 93 buildings belong into one of three different types of buildings: Processing buildings for permanent use - their owner can use this building to process resources, as soon as the processing building has been set up. Immediate buildings, which score a bonus only at the moment when they are build; this bonus must be used instantly. The third type are bonus Buildings which will yield victory points at the end of the game. In each building period a selection of 4 to 5 buildings of each kind is available, this supply is only replenished at the start of a building period. When a player has built a building by paying the respective resources, he puts it onto a free slot on his personal board. To have free slots available is not a problem in the game as landscape tiles of the types Grove, Pit and Pond take up one slot each, but can be removed at any given time without using up an action. Forest is the exception, it cannot be removed that easily, but must be chopped down to serve as payment for a specialist. And wood in this game is not a renewable resource, it does not grow again!

Buildings that are set up do remain on the slot where they were built to the end of the game, they cannot be removed or relocated. While many Processing buildings and Immediate Buildings do yield a given, fixed number of victory points, the number of victory points that can be earned with Bonus buildings is always connected to a condition.

With very few exceptions, buildings are usually constructed from a combination of wood, glass, clay and bricks. The simple resources are acquired by making use of specialists or by processing available resources via using the respective processing building.

The two high-value resources of glass and brick cannot be acquired directly from the specialists, they need simple resources that must be processed. Glass needs five different resources - Quartz sand, Wood, Charcoal, Food and Water, while Brick needs three different resources - Clay, Charcoal and Food. In analogy to previous games designed by Uwe Rosenberg you make use of production wheels in this game, too, to administrate your simple and high-value resources. Each player has two such production wheels, one for Glass and one for Brick. The simple resources are also administrated via those two production wheels. When a player has collected all simple resources on a wheel he must produce the corresponding resource of higher vale and automatically loses the simple resources necessary for production of the higher-value one, that is, for the production of one Brick you automatically lose 1 Clay, 1 Food and and 1 Charcoal. This mechanism of turning the production wheel is one of the central and important components of the game. You can store up to a maximum of three pieces of each kind of resource, Glass and Brick, on the respective production wheel at the same time.

As mentioned earlier, a player uses his specialists to acquire resources. Those specialists can be found in a deck of cards for each placer, a total of 15 specialists. Those specialists enable a player to acquire resources, build landscape tiles - Pit, Grove or Pond - or acquire building tiles. Those specialists thus decide the actions that a player can do in one building period. Each card offers two possible options for action. Frequently, specialists demand payment in the guise of resources or forest tiles. At the start of each period each player chooses five secret cards from his total of 15 cards - the remaining ten cards are not in play in this specific building period and are set aside. Then you play three rounds in which each player playes one of this cards. As you can see from the following description, this playing of cards is considerable influenced by the actions of other players.

So - in each round each player chooses the card he wants to play and sets it down, backside up. The starting player begins and reveals his card. Every other player who has this card in his hand must now play this card simultaneously to the action of the active player, which brings the two options for actions into play. Is the active player the only player who has this card available, he can implement both actions, albeit paying only once for the use of the card. If he is not alone, every other player who has this card, too, can now choose one of the actions, independently from the choice of other players. This forced play of cards is restricted to a maximum of two cards for each player: If a player hat to play one of his cards in hand twice, he must not do this again should opportunity arise. This guarantees that each player can play three cards regularly. Therefore, should a player have been forced to play a hand card twice in the turn of another player, he does play all five cards in this building period, but has only partial influence on the order in which he plays them.

During a building period the starting player does not change, that is, the same player starts all three rounds of cards. Then the starting player marker is handed to the next player in clockwise direction. In a game of four players each player has one complete building period in the role of starting player. In a game of three players the starting player for the fourth period is the player with fewest buildings on his board.

At the end of the building period you replenish the empty slots on the building board with new buildings and each player takes all specialists back in hand to select five cards for the next period.

At the end of the final building period each player adds the victory points on the buildings he constructed, individual resources are also worth some victory points. You win if you have most victory points, in case of a tie all players involved in the tie win together.

For calculating victory points from Bonus buildings the conditions are given on the building tiles. Various conditions are possible, here are a few examples: The number of victory points can relate to the the buildings constructed - adjacent ones or certain types of buildings; or relate to adjacent identical landscape tiles, or to remaining forest tiles, or to the amount of glass used for your own buildings or to slots that you built over.

Die Glasstraße is an entertaining game, in which players are involved permanently in what's going on. The designer also recommends, in case the four building periods are over too quickly, to simply add a fifth one. This suggestions is a valid one, because you really get the impression during the game that the time for constructing buildings is over too quickly and that you would like to go on building after four periods have been dealt with. The game also offers a version for solitaire play, with a few modifications to the rules and the goal to achieve a certain number of victory points.

The game is targeted very much at experienced players, but probably it will not appeal to one or the other of those experienced players. One of the main reasons for this is probably the unpredictability due to the high amount of interactions. Due to the forced playing of cards because somebody else plays this card your best-laid plans can go up in smoke completely and quickly. Very often the consequence of such forced play is that the card at that moment does not yield its full effect, as you might not yet have the necessary resources, for example, as you would get those by playing another card first, as originally intended. Automatically you plan a certain sequence of your cards for a given building period, but that sequence is often destroyed by other playes. Albeit the designer recommending that you should consider in your choice which cards the other players might play, this is of little use if you have to acquire certain resources and therefore cannot forfeit to play certain cards. There is even a little bit of an impression that one is played in those periods by the other players, because you have no influence over that mechanism. IF you want to put a positive twist on this element you can see it as thrilling and challenging to find out if your own planning will work out or not.

Yet another imponderability are the building tiles, which are replenished at the start of each building period. As only a small portion of all tiles comes into play, it is no use to to plan to build a certain building and hope for its appearance on the building board. Especially Bonus buildings do only yield several victory points, if you structure your game accordingly. For them, chance often gives you the opportunity to get a valuable building, because you happen to have the necessary resources and no other player grabs the tile before you do in your turn. If you have a stroke of luck in acquire a building yielding lots of victory points in this way then you might advance considerably in the ranking. Those bonus buildings do fluctuate rather extensively in their maximum victory point value.

There is one remedy for building selection, and that is the Feudal Lord. It is essential that you use him, even when this costs the price of one card in a building period, as the Feudal Lords allows you to take the top building from each of the three face-down stacks of building tiles. Those buildings are then your exclusive stock and can be built as buildings from general supply.

Despite all those restriction Die Glasstraße is a varied, entertaining game with basically simple rules. I would recommend it specifically if you want to play a game that is highly interactive, but not too strategic.

Bernhard Czermak

Players: 1-3

Age: 12

Time: 20 min / player

Designer: Uwe Rosenberg

Artist: Dennis Lohausen

Price: ca. 34 Euro

Publisher: Feuerland Spiele 2013

Web: www.feuerland-spiele.de

Genre: Economy, development

Users: For experts

Special: 1 player

Version: de

Rules: de en fr nl

In-game text:

Comments:

Lots of good components

Clear, nicely structured rules

Cards used to select actions

Compares to:

Verflixxt, Agricola

Other editions:

Z-Man, Filosofia, 999 Games

Bernhard Czermak

Statements:

A game that is quickly learned, is very varied due to the plethora of components and causes quite a few surprises due to the high interactive element. Planning ability of moves suffers from this interactive play.

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 3

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0