Yeehawing and Wrangling All the Way to NYC – A Great Western Trail Review

Great Western Trail
Players: 1-4
Playing Time: 75-150 minutes
Board Game Geek

When I moved west to Colorado over 11 years ago, I knew I’d be living the cowboy dream. I traded in all my shoes for boots, my ball caps for Stetsons, bought a lasso, and started calling everyone ‘partner’. Well, not really. I moved to Boulder, which in terms of the Great West, is closer to seeing a poster of the Marlboro man while returning a Patagonia jacket to the mall.

But the dream of a romanticized version of the west is imprinted on me. I still think it’s neat to pass a field full of cows and yell ‘COWS!’ every time. It’s the little things in life, ya know? Our favorite hiking spot has remnants of an old mining operation and I daydream about what it would be like to really be in that era. Instead, I can live vicariously through one of my favorite games, Great Western Trail.

My first play of Great Western Trail was the first edition; the one with the judgemental looks of the three gentlemen on the cover. I find that cover charming, but the bulk of my plays have been with the slightly graphically updated 2nd Edition. There aren’t a ton of differences between the two, and I’m not going to cover them here. I just wanted to point that out for the sake of any potential discrepancies in what I’m writing.

Mechanically, Great Western Trail is a weird mix of worker placement via a clever rondel, a dash of deck building, engine building, and racing. Yes, it doesn’t look like it but it’s a race game. I think one of the common things to do with the game when you first start playing is to try and stop at every location and take every action. This is even more the case with just two players, if neither of them are pushing the game forward.

The pacing of the game comes from how quickly players go through the board (the titular Trail) and deliver at Kansas City. Whatever unique cow cards are in their hand upon reaching the end will determine how much money they get as well as how far they can deliver to. Get enough cow points and you can deliver them all the way to New York City. Once a player delivers, they populate a market of additional worker tiles. Once this board fills, the game is at its conclusion. As play continues, the trail becomes more populated with player actions but the goal is the same – deliver as quickly as possible.

So you can choose to mosey along and try to hit every spot on the trail, but if one player is delivering and getting points while also winding down the game timer then you may get stuck like a cowpoke without a…something. It’s hard coming up with Western sounding sayings.

Before going any further, I feel like I need to highlight that my favorite cow card is the green Santa Gertrudis card. But in our household, she is known as ‘Miss Saint Gertrudy Booty’. Feel free to include that in your own gaming vernacular. That one is on the house.

Part of what I love about this game is the openness of it all. Everyone has the option of choosing their strategy. You can focus on a specific worker, you can buy better cows and treat the game like a full-fledged deckbuilder, you can build more locations on the trail, you can get your steam engine rolling down the track, or you can do a little bit of everything. In all of my plays I never know what sort of strategy I’m going to hone in on until it’s happening. And I love that!

I will admit that it took me a few plays to fully grasp all the moving pieces this game has. That’s not to say it’s immensely complicated but it does require knowing how all the gears are spinning, so to speak. There are a lot of icons and strategy was not immediately evident to me. My first play I struggled to get anything going and my final score was almost half of what the top player’s was. After a few turns of the first game, the flow was making sense but I also wanted to stop and see the sights at every location. However, like I’ve already established, that is just not going to cut it in this game when playing with anyone that knows what they’re doing.

To touch briefly on the Rails to the North expansion, if you’re a fan of the base game but maybe are feeling like each play is feeling kind of samey then it’s a no-brainer to throw the expansion in. It opens deliveries up a bit as well as another type of cow to purchase. It doesn’t add a mountain of complexity and does improve the base game quite a bit. It’s not essential, but it’s great.

To also briefly touch on Great Western Trail Argentina and New Zealand, for my money, nothing beats the original. Argentina felt a lot like the base game plus Rails to the North to me, but didn’t do anything to make me think I’d ever pick that off the shelf instead of the base game. If I didn’t own the base game it might be the version I’d choose. New Zealand felt like there were just too many moving parts. Where the base game feels incredibly lean and streamlined, New Zealand felt a little too busy. Playing it just made me long for the base game.

Playing any flavor of Great Western Trail doesn’t make me feel like I’m a ranch hand, it just makes me feel like a nerd sitting at a table gushing over what a magical game design this is. Alexander Pfister has created a gaming masterpiece for my tastes and I will never turn down a chance to play and yell yeehaw at least a dozen times throughout.

Presentation

+ Great art, distinct colors
+ Player meeples have cowboy hats!
+/- Newer printings have a glossy shine to the cardboard pieces and board
– The included insert is so close to being great but falls short in key ways. I had to 3D print something that suited my needs

Getting it Played

+ Intuitive iconography
+/- Lots of iconography
– Setup is a pain

Gameplay

+ Fantastic core loop of gameplay
+ Lots of variability and open design
+/- It will likely take a few plays before everything clicks
– Can drag out if no one is winding down the game timer

Fun Factor

+ Choosing the best option for your turns is satisfying
+ Lots of ways to play
+/- Rules make sense thematically but also the game doesn’t seem to ooze theming
+/- Scoring is obfuscated until the very end

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