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Main Catalogue |  Board Games & Card Games |  Mayfair Games |  La Strada La Strada Price: £24.50 This item usually ships in 2 to 3 days. RRP - £28.99, our price = £24.50 Board game, 2-4 players, ages 10+ As the proud owner of a northern Italian trading company, you must dispatch carts and wagons to find new customers for your goods. But times are hard and competition is fierce. Competition will only hurt sales, so even a small village can be a valuable destination. A monopoly, however modest, is still sweet. Find the best way to reach your goals and bar your opponents from success by building a trade network across the variable board. Your opponents will quickly claim their routes, so plan your strategy with care! ++++++++++++++++++++ Counter magazine review ++++++++++++++++++++ 2-4 players, 30 minutes designed by Martin Wallace reviewed by Stuart Dagger In terms of complexity this track laying game from Martin Wallace is about as far from his award winning Age of Steam as it is possible to get, but if the IGA prize winner didn\'t provide the initial idea I shall be most surprised, for what he seems to have done is take the two simplest track shapes from AoS plus the principle that tracks can only cross at towns and work them up into a new game. And it works brilliantly. The six-piece geomorphic board - which can be put together in 5!.3^5=29160 different ways, making it most unlikely that the game is going to settle into a repetitive rut on that score - makes up as a large hexagon covered with a grid of small hexagons. The terrain is a mixture of plain, woods and hills, and dotted around are 19 sites for settlements. Before the game starts, tiles showing cities, towns, villages and farms are placed randomly on these locations. The object is to build a network of trade routes and at the end you will score points for each place you have reached. Following the commercial logic, cities yield the greatest profits, followed by towns and so on down the line. Also, your points/profits fall with each extra competitor who establishes himself in the place. So your aims are to reach as many places as you can, to reach as many of the big places as you can and to make it difficult for your opponents to do the same. Each player has their own set of tiles and these are double-sided, with a straight piece of track on one side and a 120 degree curve on the other. At the start of each turn you are given 6 building points and add these to any you had left over from the previous turn, but with a ceiling of 10 for the resultant total. Placing a tile on a plain hex costs 2, on a woodland one costs 3 and on a hill costs 4. You can only build complete routes and a route must start at a location where you are already represented and end at one where you aren\'t. The game ends as soon as a player on turn is unable to build a legal route, which could be either because they have run out of the wooden blocks you use to mark your presence in a settlement or because they don\'t have enough building points. Rule sets don\'t come any simpler than this one, but the play it generates is both interesting and competitive. It is almost unheard of in my group for a second game of something to be started as soon as the first one finished, but that is what happened with La Strada, which makes it a serious candidate for a spot alongside Bluff, Take it Easy and Trans America in the small group of boardgames that challenge our usual run of trick-taking cardgames for the end of evening slot. This one could be big, and not just with gamers. It certainly deserves to be. Variant: The only potential drawback is that the random placement of the settlements can produce a prime starting location and if this happens, the starting player can find themselves with a huge advantage. This has happened in both our 4-player games. It didn\'t happen in our one game with 3, which turned out to be very close, but that might just have been down to the tiles having come out in a balanced pattern. I don\'t myself find this a big problem in a short and not too serious game, but for those who are more competitive it might be an idea to adjust the placements once the tiles have been turned face up so as to make the map more balanced and even to give the later players extra build points on the first round. Here are a couple of (as yet untried) rules that could improve things. 1. After the tiles have been placed face-up, and before anyone has chosen their starting location, Player 2 has the option of interchanging the positions of two tiles. After this Player 3 has the same option, followed by Player 4. 2. On the first round (and only on the first round) each player has 1 more build point than the preceding player. So Player 1 has the basic 6, Player 2 has 7 and Players 3 & 4 have 8 & 9 respectively. More ...     Main Catalogue |  Board Games & Card Games |  Mayfair Games |  La Strada **sRecentPrefix** <!-- Prefix to Horizontal recent item list HTML --> <br/><br/> <div class="recenththeader"> <input class="recenthtbuttonright" id="scrollbackrecent" type="button" value=" Next >>" onclick="ScrollBackRecent();"> <input class="recenthtbuttonleft" id="scrollforwardrecent" type="button" value="<< Previous" onclick="ScrollForwardRecent();"> <div style="text-align:center">Recently Viewed</div> </div> <br clear="all"/> <table id="recenthtitem"> **sRecentImageRowPrefix** <!-- Prefix to image row --> <tr><td class="recenthtitemspacer" rowspan=4> </td> **sRecentImageItem** <!-- Image item --> <td class="recenthtitemimage"> <a rel="nofollow" _HREF_="_SSURL_?PRODREF=_PID_&NOLOGIN=1" > <img border="0" width="75" src="_THUMB_" alt="_NAME_" title="_NAME_"  /> </a> </td> <td class="recenthtitemspacer" rowspan=4> </td> **sRecentImageRowSuffix** <!-- Suffix to image row --> </tr> **sRecentDescRowPrefix** <!-- Prefix to Description row --> <tr> **sRecentDescItem** <!-- Description item --> <td class="recenthtitemdesc"><a rel="nofollow" _HREF_="_SSURL_?PRODREF=_PID_&NOLOGIN=1" >_NAME_</a></td> **sRecentDescRowSuffix** <!-- Suffix to Description row --> **sRecentPriceRowPrefix** <!-- Prefix to Price row --> **sRecentPriceItem** <!-- Price item --> **sRecentPriceRowSuffix** <!-- Suffix to Price row --> **sRecentDeleteRowPrefix** <!-- Prefix to Delete row --> <tr> **sRecentDeleteItem** <!-- Delete button --> <td class="recenthtitemdelete"> <a href="javascript:DeleteRecent('_PID_', true);"> <img src="xit.jpg" border="0" /> </a> </td> **sRecentDeleteRowSuffix** <!-- Suffix to Delete row --> </tr> **sRecentSuffix** <!-- Suffix to Horizontal recent item list HTML --> </table> **sRecentEmptyList** <!-- Code for empty list -->

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