I've played a dozen or so game of The Great Western Trail. I don't pretend to understand the game or to have even explored all the strategies but I certainly like the game and can talk about some of the interesting mechanics.
I'm sick of deck building games.
There's nothing wrong with deck building games, but after playing a bunch of MtG a couple decades ago and watching the popularity of Dominion spawn a zillion deck building games, I just don't have much love for the mechanic. In particular, attempting to weight your deck with the right proportion of cards and then inevitably being disappointed when you draw a bad hand is just not fun. Even the opposite, drawing a perfect hand, feels bad since my actions had nothing to do with it.
I am so soured on deck buildinig that when I heard GWT had a deck building mechanic, I avoided purchasing it for two years. When I finally played it it was a breath of fresh air.
The first thing about this mechanic is that the deck is very simple. There are 5 values one through five. Values two and three each have 3 colors (suits) but one, four, and five are all a single suit. Your starting hand is 5 ones, and 3 twos in each of the 3 suits for a total of 9 twos. Throughout the game, you just add threes, fours and fives to your deck. There is a tiny deck thinning ability but it is hard to use.
By simplifying the elements of the deck it adds much more visibility to your deck. As the deck is used up it's often very easy to know exactly what the final cards are.
The second thing about this game is that you have a great amount of control over building a good hand. Most deck building games have you play your hand every turn and then either immediately or slowly rebuild it. This make the luck of the draw very important. In GWT the player is constantly looping through a path on the board (kind of like Monopoly) but instead of passing Go, a play ships the cows in his hand at Kansas City which gains him money, VP, and technology improvements. The types of cows in a players hand matters a little while traveling the path but not much. Many actions along the path are intended to discard unhelpful cows in the hand with the possibility of drawing better ones. In addition, the player has a lot of control over how quickly to move along the path. If the player gets a great hand early he can race to Kansas City.
Granted, the deck building mechanic is not the main part of the game, but it is a very well crafted mechanic that does not suffer the same problems as other deck builders.
The strategies in GWT are very strange. In many games there are a handful of strategies and it's generally helpful to commit to one at some point and stick with it. At first glance GWT appears to be one of those games. There are three worker tracks:
Cowboys / Cows Builders / Buildings Engineers / Trains
The game even gives you VP for maxing out each of the tracks.
The reality is that these paths are unequal. Cows seems to be stronger and easier to win with. So does it win? No, everyone knows this so there is lots of competition for cows. This invites players to dabble in the other strategies.
I'm really not clear on this at this points. There are so many strategies in the game that smoothly blend into each other that it's not easy to point to distinct strategies. All right, I'm making stuff up now. Time to play more GWT.
