Great Western Trail New Zealand

Great Western Trail New Zealand

This independent game closes this great trilogy in style.

Kia ora, and welcome to Great Western Trail New Zealand! At the end of the 19th century, you established yourself as a sheep farmer on the South Island of New Zealand. In recent years, your family farm has prospered as your different breeds of sheep have increased the quality of your wool. Now, with the arrival of a new century, new and challenging challenges have arrived. You must acquire new and better breeds of sheep to ensure the prosperity of your family business, as well as the employees who work for you. It is up to you to focus on the strengths that have led you to your current success or to diversify and undertake new projects. Will the beginning of the 20th century be as successful as the last few years, or will your strategy be surpassed by the efforts of your competition? Good luck and kia kaha!

The vast and distant lands of New Zealand await you! Put yourself in the shoes of a rancher at the beginning of the 20th century and take care of your flock of sheep. You must make your family farm prosper and adapt to the challenges that lie ahead. The sea route board adds a sea map with various paths to follow and beeee-benefits to unlock with your ship. Discover new cards that add depth and enrich the deckbuilding experience. Are you ready to face

Sarah solo? Your definitive rival awaits you! Who will be the best rancher?

MAIN NEWS OF GREAT WESTERN TRAIL NEW ZEALAND

Travel the route one last time! Get ready to guide a flock of sheep around your table. These are some of the new elements you will discover in this game:

• Customizable Home: Each player clears a disk space of their choosing.

• A fourth type of worker: the sheep shearer.

• A second type of shipment: sell your wool!

• Different sets of bonus cards in each game.

• Advance the exploration meter to unlock different rewards.

• Half of the neutral buildings are transformed during the course of the game.

• The labor market and the shipping phase have been streamlined.

Going deeper into these differences, you will soon see that New Zealand offers a very different experience from the previous games in the series:

1. All the cows are now sheep. They're adorable.

2. Bonus cards are a new mechanic. This is a minor extra piece of loot that you can have in your deck with effects like "take $2 and draw a card to replace this one" or "get 1 certificate and draw a card." Importantly, this card draw occurs in the middle of your turn, so it doesn't clog your hand or interfere with your ability to draw other important cards. You gain one of these bonus cards every time you purchase a hazard, and many other lesser systems can generate them.

3. The locomotives are replaced by an aquatic island hopping mechanism heavily inspired by the Rails To The North expansion. You use your train/ship movement to travel between islands that contain station masters, additional delivery options, or allow you to draw bonus cards. In particular, this path is not linear, so you can travel along a path that has something that interests you, and turn around and change your mind later if necessary.

4. The fourth type of employee is the "sheep shearers", who are a bit similar to the farmers in GWT Argentina. Each sheep has a "wool value" as an additional statistic. When you perform a sheep shearing action with X employees, you can discard X non-identical cards to gain cash based on their wool value. There is no penalty/card exhaustion for doing this. Optionally, after shearing, if you reach a threshold, you can turn in a disc at a sheep shearing location for a separate reward.

5. There are 10 special bonus cards, of which 4 are randomly selected each match and assigned to various reward locations. All players have access to the same 4 cards, randomness is part of keeping the game setup fresh. Among these 10 cards are 5 bonus cards, 2 3-value cows with colors that cannot be obtained anywhere else, and 3 objectives with above-average rewards and below-average requirements. Engineers are the easiest to get hold of these cards, but everyone can get a few.

6. There's a new bluebird tech path that everyone can advance, with notable rewards including permanent movement upgrades and eventual immunity to black and green hand payoff.

7. Tiles A/B/C have been rebalanced. Tiles A now have 70% employees and 30% hazards. The employees on tiles A go to a supply and demand market with stable prices. B tiles are now 30% "wild" employees that can be assigned anywhere, and 70% bonus tiles that give various rewards, such as a permanent certificate, a bonus card, the chance to permanently upgrade a card from your deck, gain victory points, and some others. C tokens no longer exist. Only the B tiles affect the tempo of the game and exactly 1 is rolled on each delivery, making the number of remaining deliveries clear and unambiguous. The board only has 5 empty rows, so the game ends after 5N+1 deliveries for N players.

8. There is no longer a gear action to remove cards from your deck. There are a couple of specific ways to reduce the bad cards in your deck, but it is extremely difficult to do it more than 2 or 3 times throughout the game.

Content:

• 1 game board

• 1 maritime route board

• 4 ranchers

• 4 hats

• 4 boats

• 4 player boards

• 5 modification tiles

• 4 fare tokens

• 4 step tokens

• 28 player tokens

• 16 danger tokens

• 34 bonus chips

• 2 cloth bags

• 64 player discs

• 40 warehouses

• 57 coins

• certificate markers

• 4 gold markers

• 1 bonus market marker

• 12 exchange tokens

• 93 sheep cards

• 24 objective cards

• 56 deck building cards

• 60 bonus cards

• 5 additional card tiles

• 4 bonus card tiles

• 8 Harbor Master Tokens

• 48 building tiles

• 1 neutral building summary tile

• 1 scoring booklet

• 1 regulation

• 1 appendix

• 17 cards from Sarah (solo mode)

• 1 specialization token (solo mode)

• 1 Sarah board (solo mode)

• 1 Sheep Market tile from Sarah (solo mode)

• 1 rulebook (solo mode)

Great Western Trail New Zealand is part of the Great Western Trail Epic Trilogy. The original game, whose mechanics you will also find in New Zealand, has received numerous awards and nominations.

• Winner International Gamers Award 2017

• Recommended Kennerspiel des Jahres year 2017

• Winner Jogo do Año Portugal 2016

• Finalist Game of the Year in Switzerland 2016

• Golden Geek Game of the Year Finalist 2016

• Finalist Best Strategy Game Golden Geek 2016