Glass Road … a short Uwe game!
Let’s take a trip back 700 years ago to the Bavarian Forest where the tradition of glass-making resides along the Glass Road. This is the setting of the Uwe Rosenberg’s game Glass Road. I love, love Uwe’s games (here I talk about Agricola and Le Havre), even backing a Kickstarter campaign to get board game T-shirts. Hell ya, Uwe is my homeboy! His games are well made, and Glass Road especially has a genius mechanic of the production wheels. But Uwe games tend to be on the longer side, which I totally don’t mind but understand how that can turn off people from his games. For such a brain-burner of a game, Glass Road is actually quite short.
Glass Road, which came out in 2013, plays 1-4 players. It plays about 20 minutes per player. Players have to manage their resources that make glass and brick, which are required to build buildings. Each player gets an identical set of 15 specialist cards and a tableau. They also each get a board for their resource wheels, one for glass and the other for brick. The player with the most victory points at the end wins the game.
The wheels in itself are an interesting mechanic. The glass wheel has spots for glass, sand, food, charcoal, water and wood. The brick wheel has spots for brick, charcoal, clay and food. As you gain resources for a particular item, you move the token up the wheel location, as numbers on the left side correspond to the amount you have. If by moving a resource up you create a space for the wheel to move forward, the arms will slide forward, and voila … you’ve created either a brick or a piece of glass. But by creating these items, you’ve consumed resources automatically and their totals go down. A big part of the game is managing these resources so that your wheel will move when you want it to move, and not because something triggered it.
The game goes through four building periods. At the start of a building period, each player chooses five specialists from their deck. Each specialist comes with two abilities; some specialists also require a resource or action to be able to use him. At the start of a player’s turn, players select a card from the five and place it in front of them face down. One player a time, that face-down card is revealed. If two or more people choose the same card from their hand, those players can only pick one of the specialist’s actions. If nobody else picked the same specialist, that player can do both actions, in either order, on the card. For each building period, players play three cards, but all five of their cards’ actions may be utilized should an opponent draw that card out from one’s hand.
It also wouldn’t be an Uwe game if there weren’t tons and tons of buildings. At the start of each building period, three rows of buildings are laid out on its own tableau. They are processing buildings (which help convert goods to other goods), immediate buildings with a one-time effect, and end-game bonus buildings. These buildings require certain resources (in addition to using a specialist who can build it) and may also provide victory points. Buildings aren’t replenished until the next period, so that an opponent may get to a building before you are able to build it. It is also worth noting that on the player tableaus, there are default buildings that give you victory points based on how many glass, brick and sand you have at the end of the game, granted that you don’t upgrade them with one of the other buildings.
The key to this game is maximizing each period’s actions by the careful selection of the five cards in your hand. You have the strike the balance of picking specialists that nobody else will pick (so that you can get two actions) as well as getting bonus single actions by guessing which specialists others will select. The game’s rules aren’t hard to learn but it’s complex, and a great score at the end is usually in the high teens. The game also adjusts for 2 players in terms of the hand management and number of buildings that are in play.
Anybody else out there a fan of this game?