Your invisible hordes of hard-working peasants, as soon as they’re given sufficient food and resources, immediately set to it in the glass- and brickworks and before you know it you’ve got some luxury items. You can even get on board with a local feudal lord who has some excellent architects on exclusive retainer (‘The feudal lord is suitably fat. You hire experts in the fields of farming and food production, irrigation, building, and quarrying to help you turn your land into useable raw materials. Your neighbourhood barons seem to be making a lot of money off this whole ‘production’ trend, so you decide to jump on board. I’m sure you’ll find some sand and mud soon enough. This is a bit odd because you don’t have any of the raw materials to make glass and brick yet, but just go with it. For some reason you also have a glassworks and a brickworks. They’re invisible, but they’re there, toiling in the harsh German sunshine. You also have lots of extremely hard-working peasants who are happy to do your bidding. Lizzy informs us that these are called ‘forests’.
You have a fair bit of land, though a lot of it is green and covered in trees. Imagine you’re a rural baron in pre-Industrial Germany. It’s the beautiful tale of why this game makes sense on both a conceptual and mechanical level, and is nerdily satisfying in the same way that all good game-lore is satisfying. It’s not even hideously long or punishing, and doesn’t make you curl up in a corner after screwing up your 3 hour long strategy in one single turn. Surprisingly, it’s only one of those things, and even then not as badly as some others**.
If you’ve any experience with European board games generally, and Rosenberg’s games in particular, you might reasonably expect this one to be heavy on the worker-placement, fairly abstract, and deeply German. It is said just looking at the rules booklet can cure insomnia.
His other offerings include Agricola and Le Havre, a game Briony has owned for more than a year and never played. That’s right kids, it’s an Uwe Rosenberg game! For those that don’t know, this guy is arguably the king of European board games. Glass Road is a self-proclaimed ‘celebration of the 700-year-old tradition of glass-making in the Bavarian Forest’.* Just hearing the rules being read can make someone on the other side of the room sit up and ask ‘ Are you playing Agricola?’. Pairs well with: Bavarian beer, some sort of spirit in a flask that can be carried around while toiling in the German forest.īut why would they build a road out of glass, though? Brutus rating: 4 daggers in the back out of 10
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