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

Hacienda

Price: £29.99

This item usually ships in 2 to 3 days.

RRP - £34.99

Board Game, 2-5 Players by Rio Grande Games Argentina at the beginning of 19th century. The pastures of the pampas seem to go on forever. You have enough money to buy land and cattle to build a small hacienda. During the game, players develop their haciendas, increase their herds and land holdings, open new markets, and worry about water supplies and harvests. Also, players must watch their competitors at all times. At game end, the winner is the player with the largest and most important hacienda. The game comes with two game boards, each requiring a different strategy and approach to be successful and win. The game also offers an alternate scoring system, giving players yet other ways to play. Hacienda is a game that requires thought and planning throughout. COUNTER MAGAZINE REVIEW: Hans im Glück / Rio Grande 2-5 players, 60-90 minutes designed by Wolfgang Kramer reviewed by Stuart Dagger There is no getting away from the fact that having a good reputation is a great help when it comes to selling games, and having two such helps even more. So when the pre-show announcements for Essen said that there was to be a new, big-box game from the combination of Wolfgang Kramer and Hans im Glück, it went straight on the list of things to be bought. Checking it out first wasn\'t deemed necessary. You only have so much time at the Fair, there are too many games vying for your attention, and so it seems a waste spending upwards of an hour playing something you know you are going to buy anyway. Whether I\'d have had quite so much faith had I looked in the box, I\'m not so sure, for the other thing there is no getting away from is the fact that the first impression you get from Hazienda is of an identikit game, one put together with an idea from here and a couple of rules from there. The box shows a stretch of land covered with a hexagonal grid, and the idea is that you put down markers to form chains and score according to the lengths of the chains and whether or not the animals in them have access to water. Add an unknown designer and your reaction would have been, ``But I already have Durch die Wüste. Why do I need this one as well?\'\'. It is not a good start for a game and things didn\'t improve that much when we first played it. It didn\'t feel like the Knizia game, but neither did it seem that exciting. Fortunately, things clicked with game two. Everyone liked it, different strategies were being tried and my initial instinct was vindicated: the combination of Kramer and HiG won\'t let you down. Hazienda turns out to be a very good game and one that I\'m sure is going to stick around. The board, which is double-sided to give you a choice of playing area, has a loop of hexagons each featuring a special type of terrain - hills, forests etc. This is tied to a deck of cards and you claim ownership of one of the hexagons by playing a matching card and placing a marker. The rest of the map is taken up with pampas, dotted round which are some markets and a few water holes. A second deck of cards and markers deals with the animals - horses, pigs, sheep and cows. The aim is to build up herds/flocks so as to earn money and points. On your turn you take three actions chosen from the menu * buy an item * play a card * play a harvest token The items on offer are cards, haciendas and water tiles. Both the animal and terrain card sets will have 4 face-up cards and a face-down deck, and you can buy either a face-up card or the top card of either deck. The face-up cards are dearer. Haciendas and water tiles are quite expensive, but are things you will want to acquire because they bring in victory points. Haciendas are placed either on groups of animals or sections of owned land. Water tiles are placed on vacant land. The effect of both is to add value. Playing a card works exactly as you would expect: play the card and place the corresponding item on the board. If the card was a land card, you place an ownership marker on a hexagon whose terrain matches that on the card. If it was an animal one, you either expand one of your existing herds/flocks or start a new one. If you are expanding, the new animal has to be put next to its own kind; if you are starting a new group, it has to go next to one of your land hexagons. Playing a harvest token is simply a way of earning money. Buying a hacienda, buying a water tile and playing a harvest token can each be done at most once in a turn; other actions can be repeated. The other way of earning money is to ``bring your animals to market\'\'. This means expanding a group in such a way as to bring it in contact with a market. Do that and each animal on a hexagon adjacent to the market will bring you money. How much is directly related to the size of the animal and land grouping of which the beast is a part. Large is most definitely good. There are two scorings, one at about the halfway point and the other at the end, and you score under various headings. 1. For the number of markets to which you are connected. This follows the familiar triangular series: 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, etc. 2. For land chains. A group of contiguous land hexagons in your ownership scores 2 points per tile, provided the group contains at least 3 tiles. Smaller than that, it scores nothing. 3. For haciendas. These will have been placed on either a group of land tiles or on a group of animals of the same species. Either way the score is 1 per tile. 4. For water tiles. Each of your animal tiles scores 1 point for each water tile to which it is adjacent. 5. For cash in hand. As in all games, the scoring dictates the strategies and as in most good ones, it pulls you in different directions and sets players against each other. Achieving connections to as many markets as possible is the first obvious aim and since the markets are scattered fairly evenly round the board, this is likely to require several disjoint land holdings - remember, that a group of animals has to be ``anchored\'\' at one of your land tiles and then grow from there to reach the market. The trouble with having too many groupings is that each has to be of at least the minimum size in order to score under the second heading and this obviously becomes harder to achieve the more you have. Also, the bigger the land group that a herd is connected to, the more it will earn when it reaches a market. Cutting rivals off from markets is another obvious aim and there is competition too over the water tiles. These come in several different shapes and sizes, and when you buy one, you decide where to place it. However, once placed it is no longer your sole property and if other players can reach it, they too will score points under heading 4. Having two boards adds to the game\'s attractions, but the package doesn\'t stop there, for it also comes with a couple of official variants, which by changing the scoring will also change players\' strategies. And to add more variety still, the HiG website offers a program which enables you to generate further maps of your own. There is a lot of mileage in this one. As I said at the start, if you had asked me immediately after my return from Essen, I wouldn\'t have rated the game that highly, but having looked a bit more closely, I\'ve changed my mind and now rate it as one of the year\'s better games.

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

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