Stuart Dagger: Canal Mania: A Preview

The most important event of 1776, and let no one tell you any different, was the building of the Worsley to Manchester canal.  It was the first in Britain and it triggered a rash of similar projects across the country.  Between them they created a network that provided the transport system necessary for the Industrial Revolution.  Their history has been largely forgotten by most of us, because in the middle of the next century their role was usurped by the railways, and if we are interested in transport history at all, it is usually the early railways that capture our imaginations.  It is the old story that when it comes to the writing of history, it is the winners that get to tell the tale.  Nonetheless, the story of the canals and the men who built them is an interesting one, and this latest game from the Ragnar Brothers takes it as its inspiration.

This is not going to be a review.  I shall be writing a review for the next issue of Counter, and if you think that an editor is going to start scooping his own magazine, you are seriously deluded!  In any case, my copy of the game only arrived this morning and I haven’t yet played it.  What I am going to do instead is give you more information than you can get from the website, so that you’ll be in a better position to decide whether the game is the sort that interests you.  The print run is not a large one, and we are all familiar with situations where a game sells out before we have realized that we wanted a copy.  This should help you avoid that.

The production is up to the top professional standard that we get from the leading German companies.  In the past, games from the Ragnars have had “tea towelsâ€? rather than boards and have used a restricted set of colours so as to save on printing costs.  Everything has always been fully serviceable and fit for purpose, but there is no denying that when placed alongside those from the likes of Alea and the rest, the games looked a bit dowdy.  This time they have had the game made for them in Germany, so you get a mounted board, decent quality cards, full colour everything and nice bits.

In style the design of the game belongs to neither the German nor the American schools, being both strongly thematic and pretty much chrome-free.  It knows what story is trying to tell and the mechanisms all flow from that, but it eschews the fiddly detail that makes something like the Fantasy Flight remake of Warrior Knights difficult to teach.  This will be easy to teach.  The playing time, which if the box is to be believed is around 2 hours, is also an intermediate one.

The board shows most of England and a small corner of Wales.  Building canals is a matter of laying tiles on the hexagonal grid in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has played games such as Age of Steam or 18xx.  The difference this time is that the tiles come in four types—simple stretches, locks, aqueducts and tunnels—and that each player has their own set.  So if you run out of tunnels or locks, it is your own fault.  Each tile is double-sided so that it can be played as either a straight section or as a 120 degree curve.  The simple stretches and the locks are used for flat terrain and the other two for the hills.  There are also building regulations that, for example, force you include locks and stop your tunnels or aqueducts being too long, and thereby make the whole process more interesting.

Unlike the railway games I mentioned, you can’t just build at will.  First you need a contract from the Government.  This will specify the start and finish points and will also put a cap on the number of tiles you can lay as part of the route.  So if you have contracted to build a canal from London to Oxford, you have to take a fairly direct route; there is no question of going via Leeds.  This keeps the canals looking realistic.

The other thing you need in order to build is cards.  These correspond to the different types of canal section, and you have to hand over the right cards before you can lay the tiles.  Hilly terrain, naturally enough, requires more cards.  Collecting cards of the right type doesn’t look to be a major problem, as you will normally have two canals under construction and you are selecting from a face-up display rather than drawing from a face-down deck.

The cards also generate goods, which are placed on towns and cities using a colour coding system.  Shipping them around is one of the ways to score points; others come from the features you have built on each canal and from being high up on the “contracts completedâ€? ladder.

The final feature that needs to be mentioned is the engineers.  Each player has one of these in his employ at any one time and each of them has special skills which will make certain aspects of the building process simpler. Firing your current engineer and replacing him with one poached from an opponent is considered fair game.

Each player turn has three simple phases and, as in a lot of the best games, you have a choice of actions in each one.  Also as with many of the best games, only being able to choose one action in each phase them will cause you grief and force you to plan ahead.

As I said, I have not played the game so far, but I plan to change that soon. It looks like my sort of game.

And if you ask me very nicely, I’ll explain how to pronounce Worcester and Llangollen.

The game can be ordered from the Ragnar Brothers website.  Its URL is www.ragnarbrothers.co.uk.

© 2006 Stuart Dagger

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-- And if you ask me very nicely, I’ll explain how to pronounce Worcester and Llangollen. Let me guess… “Wuss-ter” and “Smith” Is that right? Posted by Dale Yu on Jul 13, 2006 at 11:36 AM | #

Gee. Stuart Dagger being interested in a rail game. Will wonders never cease. My copy arrived this morning, and your preview is quite correct. The game is clearly a rail game, and is perhaps somewhere in complexity between Ticket to Ride and Age of Steam, with some elements resembling both of those two games. But it definitely has some new elements. Contracts and terrain are quite different. The production has very Warfroggy components and sizes, although the rules are a bit clearer Posted by Frank Branham on Jul 13, 2006 at 12:23 PM | #

"Warfroggy”—I’ll need to add this to my list of adjectives. Posted by Scott Kinzie on Jul 13, 2006 at 07:43 PM | #

The Wey Navigation opened in 1653, a little before 1776. It was (as I recall from a visit - it’s owned by the NT, from whose website my dates come, I only remembered them roughly) a false dawn of the canal age, though still itself useful. Its Godalming Navigation extension opened in 1764, so even that predates 1776 Posted by Christopher Dearlove on Aug 13, 2006 at 04:56 PM | #

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