Great Western Trail

Great western trail, beautiful, phenomenal game brings me full circle to get to do a review of a game. Second edition that i did the first edition of ...

Great Western Trail also the game board. It's tile placement, but on the board instead of on the table. Having a bit of deck building, some worker placement, that unique track that's both a market for employees and a time track, the little train as a marker between fines you have to pay, taking a few turns along the road to reach the end and get a reward for what you've done - and then back to the start to do it again and again. It's quite odd, and it doesn't even feel like it.

I feel like this game has the same issue as Great Western Trail had early when people thought that game was a deck builder also. It really uses the deck builder part of the game only as a very opportunistic approach only, it's not a full deck builder if you try to play it that way you are going to be very disappointed. If you have a pile of 60 cards in your deck you're playing the game very wrong, to be honest.

I'm glad that that the Second Edition of **Great Western Trail** recently released, and have been enjoying its solo mode. I'm looking forward to see what Pfister does differently for the Argentina and New Zealand variations of the game, set to be released in 2022 and 2023, respectively. He's also been working on a rework and retheme of **Mombasa**, so I'm interested to see how that turns out.

Great Western Trail didn't click for me, but I chalk that up more to circumstance than anything. Though Gloomhaven genuinely frustrated me. I think there's just too much admin for what's honestly a pretty simple hand management / dungeon crawler game.

**Great Western Trail:** Played this with the Rails to the North expansion and loved it. The expansion fits in seamlessly and feels like it was always there, plus makes interesting new decision space. Honestly, it's probably also my favourite deck building game (that's right, I said it). Cows ftw.

**Great Western Trail** - (1x2p) we borrowed this from a friend to see if we should get the new version. My husband had played it once and liked it and I had never played it. I see why people like this game, but for us it was a little meh. We like games with interaction and there was almost none here.

**Great Western Trail**: Didn't really flop, but my friends were very indifferent to it after our second play through. Granted it was on Tabletop Simulator and all of the moving parts can tend to be overwhelming, but no one got very excited by it. I'm glad we tried it on TTS first, since I was pretty convinced I was going to plonk down money for it when we were able to play again in person, but not anymore.

I felt this way about both Dominion and Great Western Trail. A lot of fun the first half dozen times, but found myself bored by the middle of games after that. Glad they are both games I never pulled the trigger on buying.

Great Western Trail, Maracaibo, Architects of the West Kingdom, GuGong, Food Chain Magnate, Nemesis... Literally the list is 100's long. So many great games to play that DON'T require an expansion for the perfect experience. You'll be happy playing these with or without expansions- they are so good/solid from the box.