In this game, you're managing a Viennese cafe and working to establish it as a successful, growing hotel. You draft cafe customer cards from an ever-changing queue, deliver them specific food and drinks (resources), and then move them into color-coded hotel rooms -- scoring points along the way.
There are some very nice mechanics built into the game that regularly bump you out of any carefully laid plans you've made, in a fun and challenging way. For one thing, money is super tight. A strategic choice might be available and clearly best for you in terms of scoring points... yet it might simply be too expensive for you to afford. So you face a choice: take extra turns to earn the money for that best option (assuming someone else doesn't snatch it up first), or embrace what's clearly a second-best choice and make that work.
Dice play an interesting role in the action-taking system. At the beginning of each round, a large collection of dice is rolled, then sorted by result. Each number, 1 through 5, corresponds to one specific action you can take in the game. On your turn, you select one of those five actions, and do it according to how many dice of that value have been rolled -- more dice means it's more effective for you. When you make a choice, you remove one of the dice, making that action less effective for the players behind you. (Meanwhile, a 6 lets you choose any action, but with an extra charge to pay for that flexibility.)
Here again, the game is encouraging you to rethink your plans. The action you really want to take might only have 1 or 2 dice associated with it. Meanwhile, this other action you weren't considering might have 4 or 5 dice there. Can you alter your plans to take advantage of a big opportunity like that? But then, with certain things you must do every few rounds to avoid a penalty, are you going to have to stick with your original plan no matter what? Adjusting on the fly is a big, fun part of this game.
But there is an aspect of the game that I'm a bit wary of. At the start of the game, you're dealt a hand of "staff" cards, people you can hire on whose special powers help you in the game. While none can be categorized as truly "bad," there are some that seem clearly better than others... and plenty that seem to combine with each other in potent ways. While there are a handful of ways to pick up new staff cards during the game, you're (for the most part) limited to making the most of the ones you're dealt at the start -- sort of in keeping with the game's "make the best of what you have in the moment" design philosophy.
Yet these cards give me Agricola vibes -- and not the good kind. Without taking too long a side trip, Agricola is an engaging farming game that I played plenty of in person, and even more through its smartphone adaptation. I played it over and over and over... until one day, the curtain fell: no matter how clever your decision-making during the game, the winners and losers seemed determined too much by the opening hands dealt to each player.
I've played nowhere near as much Grand Austria Hotel as I have Agricola, so it's far too early to make definitive judgments. But I am nervous that the staff cards of Grand Austria Hotel have a similarly outsized effect on the outcome. I like enough of the rest of the game that I'd like to play more anyway... and I very much hope to be proven wrong in my suspicions. Yet however much I want to love this game, it's also kind of "on notice" with me.
For the moment, I'd give Grand Austria Hotel a very provisional B. With more plays, I could see that moving as much as a full letter-grade up or down... and because of that, it's hard to say right now whether I'd recommend it or not. Perhaps I'm really looking for other gamer friends of mine who have played it more (I strongly suspect you're out there) to weigh in and tell me their experiences with the game, and with the staff cards in particular.
Here's hoping I can someday do a follow-up post to this with a ringing endorsement of Grand Austria Hotel.
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