OUR REVIEW

Build airports and transport passengers

Aeroplanes: Aviation Ascendant

Railroad game with airplanes

Aeroplanes - once more a game by Martin Wallace! He has published quite a number of games with different publishers. This one has been published by Mayfair Games, and that, too, is not a new constellation; Steam or Automobile, published with the last few years, come to mind.

In Aeroplanes players try to develop an air transport company in the start-up times of commercial air travel.

The graphic design of the board reminds of games that were published in the Treefrog line, and yet this time the artist is not the regular artist Peter Dennis who is responsible for it, but Patricia Raubo. The board is not especially pretty but very clearly structured and well-defined. The board shows parts of the world, also a scoring track and a few more areas and tables. Europe is disproportionally big with some important cities and 2 to 3 spots for airports for each. Underneath Europe, clearly smaller in relation, one finds Africa, Asia and Australia, again with a few selected cities or countries or regions with 2 spots for airports for each. To the left of this we find two spots for airports for North and South America serving as long distance destinations.

Between the cities, countries, regions and continents colored lines are printed, which are important for the setting-up of new airports, but more on this later.

The game is played over three eras, which basically all follow the same schematics, the only difference between them is the amount of money that is handed out to players in the ears - in the first one you receive 12 money units, in the second era you get 22 and in the third you are given 32 units.

Each player chooses a home airport, selected from six cities in Europe (Paris, Amsterdam, London, Zürich, Rome and Berlin). Then the era begins with the starting player. During an era players in turn have actions. Each player always chooses one of five actions and implements it, and then the turn passes to the next player.

Those five possible actions are:

1. Buy an airplane

Next to the board there always is a display of airplane cards laid out. These airplane cards have different prices and either yield one or two airports of the development stages I, II or II, give you 0 or 1 victory point at the end of the game, have a transport capacity of one to six passengers or are fit for long distance travel or not.

If you choose the action „buy an airplane“ you take one airplane card of your choice from the display, pay the price and place the card together with the airport tiles of your color, pictured on the card, in front of you.

Then the display of airport cards is replenished. As the cards are always sorted by numbers at the start the order in which those cards come into play is always the same.

2. Build an airport

The airport tiles can be placed on the world map with this action, and of course there are some rules for this that must be adhered to: Starting from your home airport or other airports of your own that have already been placed on the board, you can place any number of your own airport tiles, which are sitting on airport cards in front of yourself, on adjacent cities. Adjacent is defined by being connected by a colored line.

Those lines have different colors and those colors symbolize and indicate the difficulty of the new route of flight. When you want to use any other than a white line - and those white lines can only be found in Europe - you must roll the dice to determine if you have reached the new destination and if you can build there.

To do so you roll three dice. Those three dice show the usual pips 2 to 6; instead of the 1 they carry a symbol for engine damage. The total of the pips you rolled must surpass a certain threshold value which is dependent on the difficulty of the route, to be able to build the airport. When the total is too low, you can add to the total with money or pilot tiles to be able to build all the same. If you do not want to pay or if you cannot pay you cannot place the airport tile and you must put it back on the airplane card and the action ends instantly.

The engine damage symbols equal a value of 0 and give you tiles for engine damage, too. When you - while trying to build - roll and acquire your 4^th engine damage tile, you must stop your building actions instantly and must discard the airport tile you wanted to place together with the four engine damage tiles. Airport tiles on airplane cards capable of long distance flights are deemed to be long distance airplanes.

Such long distance airplanes allow you to leave out cities, but for this you must roll the dice once again, even inside Europe. Furthermore, some routes, for instance for both Americas, can only be managed with long distance airplanes.

Basically airport tiles are always placed on free airport spots; should a city be complete, you can upgrade an airport, that is, replace it with a tile of a higher level. This can result in ousting players from a city.

3. Transport passengers

In order to achieve commercial success airlines must transport passengers, naturally. For this purpose there is a randomly drawn display of passenger tiles. Those passenger tiles are always assigned to one of the six starting airports (Paris, Amsterdam, London, Zürich, Rome or Berlin), show and target and also a number between 1 and 3. As an action you can take one of those tiles, but only when you have an airport in the starting city and in the destination city as well as an airplane that has enough transport capacity left. The passenger tile is then placed on the corresponding airplane card and blocks capacity of the plane according to the number on it.

4. Buy a Bonus tile

For one money unit per tile you can acquire bonus tiles, for instance pilot tiles which can be added to your roll of dice, or maintenance tiles which allow you to discard all engine damage tiles. All such bonus tiles can be used only one and are then put back in general stock.

5. Acquire subsidies

At the start of each era 8 coins and a black marker are placed into the subsidies area. As an action you can take one of those coins, or, if all coins have already been taken, the black marker. Taking of the black marker immediately results in the end of the current era.

At the end of each era there is a scoring and you score majorities for the number of airports in Europe, Asia and Africa and the profit generating of the airlines.

For this profit making capability you add the number of transported passengers and subtract the unused capacity of the airplanes. Both numbers are only valid for the current era, because after scoring all passenger tiles are removed and all airport cards are turned over; unused airport tiles and passenger capacities can be used in the next eras.

With the end of the third era the games ends and after a final scoring - some airplane cards and passenger tiles score additional points - you win with the highest total of points.

Resume

Build routes and transport passengers and collect victory points for doing so, that sounds like a typical classical railways game and that is also the flair Aeroplanes emits. I do not want to know how often I said railway station instead of airport when explaining the game!

Aeroplanes is a nice game, where you must permanently make lots of small decisions. Can I wait for one more round with building an airport in order to build more later on or will I be too late to acquire all necessary passenger tiles? Can I buy another airplane or will I be lacking passengers for them and will the unused capacity ruin my profit making score?

And on top of that you need to keep an eye on your fellow players.

But, as an expert and frequent player, I do not like the high chance element from rolling dice, even if this can be minimized by busily collecting bonus tiles, because that costs you lots of valuable actions that could be put to better use.

But, players who do not like the usual possibilities to plan ahead in typically European games will love that chance element; in Aeroplanes you even roll dice to determine the starting player.

For casual players the game seems much to laborious, and the playing time is rather long, even if you can remain clearly below the 2 hour mark, at least with three players.

Very bad, unfortunately, are - in my opinion - the English rules, which, again in in my opinion, leave some gaps in the rules. And there are some details that I noticed which leave a slightly unfinished impression. Why, for instance, is Zürich given its German name, but Rome, Vienna, Warsaw, Moscow and Copenhagen their English names. I have also found a printing error in the name of an airplane. Yet all in all the airplane cards are the highlight of the game components. All airplanes correspond to historic types and are very prettily drawn. For 46 cards this took a lot of research and drawing efforts, similar to Automobile.

Markus Wawra

Players: 3-5

Age: 12+

Time: 120+

Designer: Martin Wallace

Art: Patricia Raubo

Price: ca. 50 US $

Publisher: Mayfair Games 2012

Web: www.mayfairgames.com

Genre: Railway game despite the topic

Users: With friends

Version: en

Rules: en

In-game text: no

Comments:

Well-arranged design

Some mistakes in details

Airplanes lovingly designed with historical details

Long but incomplete rules

Compares to:

Steam, Age of Steam, Ticket to Ride

Other editions:

Currently none

My rating: 4/7

Markus Wawra:

The expert player within me does not like the sometimes deciding chance element of tolling dice, for an in-between-game or for the casual player the game clearly is too demanding, so I am missing a target group.

Chance (pink): 2

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 2

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0