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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Rio Grande Games | Australia

Australia

Price: £29.99

Board Game, 2-5 Players, Ages 10+ by Rio Grande Games Australia - the fifth and smallest continent at the beginning of the 1920s. The economic crisis is yet to come - Australia is booming. Industrial modernisation and development are pursued with vigour to help the economy \'down under\' progress. At the same time, the government is arranging for countless National Parks to be set up and are initiating numerous projects to support the natural environment. Every player leads a troop of rangers who have been assigned the task, by the government, of carrying out various conservation and industrialisation projects.The most successful player wins the game. ----------------------------------------------------- COUNTER MAGAZINE REVIEW ----------------------------------------------------- 2-5 players, 60-90 minutes designed by Michael Kiesling & Wolfgang Kramer reviewed by Stuart Dagger Gamers, especially those of us who also write on the subject, like to group titles together and we award ourselves bonus points when we can assemble some sort of case for regarding three titles from the same author as being a trilogy. So there was the ``tile laying\'\' trilogy of Euphrat & Tigris, Samurai and Durch die Wüste from Reiner Knizia and the ``action point\'\' trilogy of Tikal, Java and Mexica from Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer. The links are actually fairly tenuous when you come to look closely at the games concerned and I suspect that the authors would go further than that and claim that they only really exist in the minds of people who spend too much time talking and not enough actually playing. However, if you do regard the Tikal, Java, Mexica trio as being meaningfully related, then the best way to regard this new title is as a fourth member of the family. Not a sibling, but a less sophisticated country cousin. The board is a map of Australia and the surrounding ocean, and it is divided into large areas (18 land and 6 sea). At various points on the borders between adjacent areas are ``campsites\'\'. At the start of the game two markers, one signifying an environmental project and one an industrial one, are placed in each area. These represent the scoring opportunities and triggering them is a matter of getting the right combination of ``rangers\'\' into the campsites on areas\'s borders. Each player has a plane and a set of rangers and on their turn will perform two actions from a menu consisting simply of * move your plane; * place rangers on a campsite and collect cash; * remove rangers from the board. The most common combination is one each of the first two, but if your plane is already in the right place it might be to your advantage to make two placements, and after a time you will need to start taking men back from the board so that you can use them more profitably elsewhere. Moving your plane is straightforward: you just shift it to a new area - land or sea - and distance is no object. Removing men from the board is also uncomplicated: you may retrieve up to four from camps on the border of the region where your plane is located. The second option is less simple and involves playing a card. Each area is in one of six colours and each card has one of these colours on its front side and four circles on its reverse. Inside each circle is a picture of either a ranger or a coin and the pattern will always feature at least one ranger. Before the game starts, the cards are sorted by the pattern on their reverse and each set is shuffled to form a mini-deck. Each player has a hand of two cards, and in order to place rangers on to the board you must first play one of them. You then take as many coins and place as many rangers as are shown in the pattern on the card. Your plane must already be in the target area and the colour of the area must match the colour of the card. All the 1-4 rangers that you play are then put into a single campsite on the area\'s border and this can be either one that was previously empty or one that already contains your own men. You may not place men into a campsite that is occupied by another player. Having played your card and placed your men, you draw a replacement card from the mini-deck of your choice. The reason for placing men is to try and set up a scoring opportunity. An environmental marker is scored when all the campsites surrounding the area where it is located are occupied. Each ranger in one of these campsites scores 1 point for its owner (except for those at sea which score 2) and there is a 3 point bonus for the player who triggered the scoring. The number of rangers involved will average at about 6-7, with the points for them likely to be split among several players, and so you can see that the bonuses are significant. Trying to gain them will be one of your primary aims. The scoring for the industrial markers is done in the same way, but is triggered differently. Each of these markers has a number in the range 4-9 which is revealed the first time a plane lands in the area. Scoring happens when the number of rangers in the surrounding campsites is exactly equal to this number. If there are already more than the requisite number present, it will be necessary to remove some. Both types of marker are removed from the board after they have been scored. Picking up bonuses is one of the keys to success; the other is getting maximum value from your larger placements. Because the campsites are on the boundaries of areas and not in their interiors, each group of rangers has the potential to be involved in more than one scoring. Moreover, those scorings are quite likely to be close together and may even happen on the same turn. It is quite possible that a player landing his plane in a region will be able to trigger the scoring for both the environmental and industrial markers or for one marker in this region and one in the region next door. It is these chain effects that arise from campsites being on boundaries that are the main piece of cunning in the design, for they make the game. I was worried when I first read the rules that this was going to be one of those games where areas edge slowly towards a score and then someone swoops in: you do most of the work and someone else collects the reward. But that isn\'t what happens. It is inevitable that you will set up scoring opportunities for others - and you must be careful not to be too generous about this - but you will do it as a biproduct of scoring points for yourself, which takes out the niggle factor. The game ends when the cards run out, at which point you complete the round so as to equalise the number of turns for all players and then add the gold coins you have acquired to the points you have accumulated. What I have described so far is the basic game. There is also an ``advanced\'\' one, which involves a windmill and a couple of extra tracks. The windmill moves round the board according to symbols om some of the industrial markers, and if your plane is in the right location relative to the windmill, you can place rangers on one of these two tracks instead of in a campsite. Scored markers are placed on the other track and each time it fills there are points handed out for rangers on the first one. It adds an extra wrinkle to the game\'s tactics, so you might as well try it, but it is not one of those alternatives that is going to change your opinion of the game as a whole. Most of the play is in the basic game. Australia is less intricate and less deep than Tikal, Java or Mexica, and it is not a game for strategic plans. What you find yourself doing instead is trying to keep ahead tactically and to grab opportunities as they arise in what is a fast changing situation. It is a good game and we enjoyed it, but when I rate it as ``good\'\', I\'m deliberately eschewing better ratings such as ``very good\'\' and ``excellent\'\' - 7 out of 10 in other words. One final point: we have only played with three players and I suspect that this is probably the best number. More players will mean less control

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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Rio Grande Games | Australia

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