Anno 1800: The Board Game
Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 120
Board Game Geek
There are some key elements to Anno 1800 that you don’t necessarily need to be interested in to get the most out of the game. Tall ships. Exploration. Industrialization. Sausage factories. However, the true power of the game is in controlling the sausage factory. Because then you also control the “that’s what she said” jokes.
Martin Wallace is one of my favorite designers. Though he is likely best known for Brass and his train games, he has some odd designs in his oeuvre that still feel like his designs but also don’t feel like anything else on the market. Anno 1800 is somewhere in between for me in that it is serious but doesn’t feel like much else on the market.
The theme has you starting a new island community in a race to industrialize, explore, and expand. Abstracted mechanically, it can be broken down as a tech tree/worker placement/resource generator game. It’s also based on a series of computer games that I have never played, so I can’t speak much about the integration of the theme. But like most Euro games, you can squint hard enough past it. The theme isn’t the selling point here, for me.
Players start the game with an identical mat of a settlement. It has some basic factories on it and you will also get a handful of worker cubes of different colors.
The workers are one of the most interesting things about this design, though. Every worker cube you have at your disposal corresponds to a card in your hand with a person’s photo on it. Each of these worker cards also has a requirement at the top that they’d like you to fulfill so they can actually move into your settlement, satisfied and smiling.
Get a new worker, draw a new card! It’s great…until you have a hand overflowing with worker cards. Oh, and did I mention that the end condition for the game is that one player has no more cards in hand?
This is a very small but genius design decision that moves the entire game along. This is where the sausage really gets made. You want the right number of workers to carry out actions but not too many or you will struggle fulfilling their requirements. Fulfilling the worker requirements is the driving force behind this game.
You will need to continuously build new factories to fulfill the worker contracts. The contracts help guide what things you should focus on building. One worker might require a sausage and a beer (really, who doesn’t require this?).
Great, now you know you’ll need those factories so you have something to work toward. Another worker requires a steam engine and glasses factory. Well that glasses factory requires a glass factory first so you can start there but oh no! Someone else beat you to it and there aren’t any more remaining in the market… But don’t fret, you can also trade with your fellow players!
Trading is another genius design choice and something that takes this game from a heads-down multiplayer solitaire experience to an incredibly dynamic experience not often seen in Euro games. As long as you have trading tokens available to you, you can trade with a fellow player for whatever resources you need. This also provides them with some much-needed gold in the process, which they can, in turn, use to retrieve one of their workers.
It all works incredibly well and there is a constant feeling of momentum as you build things, explore new lands, and open up more factory space. Upgrade your workers to do better things, build better ships, and finally give them the eternal satisfaction they deserve by completing their contract so they can ascend to your score pile.
For two-players, however, there is one major drawback to the game and it’s one that almost put my wife and I off entirely. While setting up, I kept expecting the rulebook to have a footnote or something for two-player setup adjustments or other rules adjustments. There were none and there really should have been. It’s a huge oversight because rules-as-written, the market has two of most of the factory tiles. This essentially means that both players in a two player game can just build what they want and trading only happens occasionally.
It’s a perfectly cromulent experience this way, though the pacing was kind of plodding and we were left mostly unimpressed. Luckily, we both saw the glimmer of something in the design that demanded another shot with some tweaks to the setup. Removing half of the factory tiles (except for ships and docks) so only one of each is available opened this up as something incredible. This feels like how it was meant to be played at this player count and mimics the fun of having three or four people around the table. It’s a simple adjustment and it absolutely should have been in the rules from the start.
I’m not exactly sure why Anno 1800 is as fun as it is, but there is a lot to love. Turns are incredibly snappy, there is a ton of player interaction, the progression has momentum, and it’s just got a quick dopamine hit at every opportunity. Though there are some rules that try to squash the fun or extend the game’s playtime, some easy house rules make this baby sing.
Presentation
+ Layout of everything is clean and straightforward
+/- Not exactly exciting thematically
Getting it Played
+ Fairly easy to teach
+/- Some rules are trickier than they may need to be
+/- Houserules make the experience better (and are almost necessary at 2-player count)
+/- While not directly celebrating colonialism, it’s there
– Setup is absolutely awful
Gameplay
+ The core gameplay loop is wonderfully simple and quick
+ Decisions are all meaningful and timing is everything
+ A highly interactive Eurogame
+/- The game length is highly variable and first plays may drag
Fun Factor
+ Turns are fast, player interaction is high, there is meaningful progress being made all the time
+/- New players will likely get stomped by unfriendly, experienced players
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Allie