Great Western Trail: Cow-abunga

Great Western Trail is a heavy deck building and rondel European style board game, now with a spiffy new edition. This new edition features improved artwork, fancy meeples (with hats!), and updated thematic ties that were problematic in the first edition of the game.

But how does it play?

In Great Western Trail, players are ranchers in the old west, herding cattle to sell them in Kansas. The board shows the great western trail, which players travel around during the game. This trail breaks off into different routes before ending in Kansas. Along the way, players can stop at different buildings where they can perform actions like selling cows for money, buying better breeds of cow, hiring workers or even building new buildings to populate the trail.

Your herd of cattle is represented by a deck of cards, and the idea is to get to Kansas City with a hand of different, high-scoring cows. Once you get to Kansas, you sell your cows for money and deliver them to one of many cities. A better hand of cows sells to a more developed city, earning you more money. Those more developed cities are further away (thematically), meaning that you’ll have to pay some delivery fees to go to these cities, but there are ways to curb this. Copies of the same type of cow are ignored (so, for example, if you have two Criollo cows, you’d only get paid for one Criollo), so it is crucial to tailor your herd before you get to Kansas.

Your personal player board has a section for you to hire workers – cowboys, builders, and engineers. Cowboys make buying cows cheaper, builders allow you to build more powerful buildings, and engineers help you move your train. As you and other players build more buildings, the opportunities to score points and build a great hand of cows grow as well. At the same time, the Great Western Trail grows longer, meaning that it takes longer to get from the start of the trail to Kansas. The distance you can travel is limited, which means your decision space each turn is limited to just a few options – great for newer players and players who are used to lighter games.

In classic Euro Game fashion, there are loads of different tracks you can bump up. One of these is a (drumroll please) train track. Advancing your caboose up this track reduces those delivery fees for selling to expensive cities. Better still, there are train stations along this track. If players are the first to reach these stations, they can drop off one of their employees at the stations to gain an immediate benefit – for example, money or points – and an extra end of game scoring criteria unique to you.

Great Western Trail really excels at higher player counts. With more players, the level of interactivity between players increases. More buildings get thrown out to clog the trail, there is more competition for hiring new workers, there is more tension in the cattle market when buying better cows, and the race up the train track becomes increasingly tense. However, with so many different avenues for scoring, players tend to spread their efforts instead of focusing on just one tactic. The interplay between the various game mechanics start to shine, and it makes for a fantastic and satisfying puzzle.

That being said, most of my plays of Great Western Trail have been at 2 players. Yes, there is less interaction, but it’s still a gratifying puzzle to figure out. A 2 player game between players who know the game well can absolutely zoom by. It’s fantastic at 2, but even better at 3 or 4!

Another great thing about Great Western Trail is its replayability. There are many variables to consider when planning your strategies, and these can change from game to game. The pool of workers for hire changes from game to game, meaning that strategy viability can change from game to game and players can’t get away with always sticking to a single strategy. There are many possible railway station tiles provided – another variable to consider. Certain railway stations can be more powerful than others, which makes engineer-heavy strategies vary in effectiveness from game to game. Available cows in the cow market are also left to the luck of the draw, so the value of cowboys is also not set in stone. These variabilities means that players have to make their own decisions regarding which strategy to pursue, which is super satisfying when done right.

However, some of the game’s randomness can be frustrating. The randomness of shuffling your cow deck may make or break your deliveries. Not having the exact cow you need at the right time can cripple your plans. While a lot of Great Western Trail is about mitigating this luck, this can only go so far. Landing on the building where you can sell a Galloway for money before hiring new workers but not having any Galloways to sell can be infuriating! The good news is that the second edition of the game goes even further in mitigating luck, providing new “draw-two-discard-two” tokens to help players when they are in a pinch. Nonetheless, this inherent randomness has been a sticking point in some of my plays of Great Western Trail.

Also new to the second edition of Great Western Trail area two new variants: a new breed of cows that grow over time and become more valuable, and a solo variant.

The solo variant introduces Sam, an automa system that mimics another player. Like others before him, Sam uses a deck of cards to determine his actions. This makes the solo variant an easy variation to make to the game, as all you really have to do is turn a card over and do what it says.

Where Sam spices things up is in the “specialisation” mechanic. Like you, Sam has a track for placing hired workers. Whenever he has more of one type of workers than the others, he “specialises” in that worker type. When he is specialised, the action cards corresponding to those workers is boosted massively.

This does a wonderful job of mimicking real human play: players tend to specialise in one type of worker, supercharging one aspect of their play. Similarly, if Same (for example) has loads of cowboys, his cow buying abilities become supercharged. It’s a very clever way of introducing variation in the solo game, and in mimicking multiplayer tactics.

However, the automa has its limitations. Deciding which worker to buy, and which cows to buy is based on simple logic rules: Sam always buys the cheapest workers and always buys the cows which grant him the most points within his budget. Having these rules in place makes it possible to guess what he would do, and I’d play around this logic in my games whenever I expected those cards to come up. So, the automa can’t fully imitate the slight element of randomness that comes in multiplayer games, but it does a pretty solid job nonetheless. It’s got minimal set up, minimal rules overhead, and allows for a nice solo mental puzzle.

Great Western Trail: Second Edition reinvigorates a classic medium-heavy Eurogame with new art, variations on the theme, and introduces two great variants. If you like heavy thinky games and you’ve been umming and ahhing about picking up a copy, my recommendation is simple: get this game. If you’re a newer gamer thinking of taking things up a notch, GWT is a very good first step into more complicated games – it has loads of moving parts and paths to victory, but each round provides a relatively small decision space to work in. If you’ve already got a copy of the old GWT though, it becomes more difficult. The Simmental variant isn’t enough, in my opinion, to warrant getting a new copy of the game. However, if you find yourself playing solo quite frequently, the solo variant might make it worth your while to trade up.

I personally traded up my old copy of Great Western Trail for the newer one, in favour of the beautiful new components (those hats!) and the Simmental cows – so this wasn’t my first rodeo (it was my second rodeo).

All that’s left for me to do now is…wait for Great Western Trail Argentina!