Anno 1800
January 29, 2022 | ≈ 947 words | Anno 1800
Thoughts on Anno 1800
Anno 1800 is my favorite game of 2021. It officially came out in 2020, but new board games did not exist in 2020. So 2021 release it is.
My first encounter with this game was Pax Unplugged 2021, where a friend was playing it behind me while I was in the middle of a game of Beyond the Sun. The interesting thing about this was, Anno 1800 is a much better tech tree game than Beyond the Sun would ever be, but Past-Me would never have known that. To me, at the distance of 10 paces that I saw the game, it looked like a heavy game with fiddly rules that took too long for me and would cause too much AP for a 4 player game.
I was wrong on all accounts.
Anno 1800 is the smoothest playing euro I’ve experienced all year, with interesting, chunky parts to chew on but a free-flowing fine-grain sandbox-y feel. These are words to describe board games and also a jar of salsa. The game itself looks like it could have come out of a jar labeled: “Old World Chunky Ragu”, but playing it really nails the feeling of being in the middle of a flea market and trying to trade up until you get the binder full of rare Pokemon cards that in the end mean nothing to everyone else but for you is the entire point of being there.
Lets start with the basics. Everyone gets a board with a bunch of squares/tiles on it that they can activate to “produce” a material. Materials! You “produce” by dropping a cube on it matching the tiles’s color, and you “produce” when you want to get a new tile with new a material on them that you can also “produce” like every other tile. Tiles! This tile has icons at the top showing what materials you need to drop a cube on to research it, and other tiles use that new material later to research cooler rarer higher tier materials that you use to…get victory points. The entire game is looking at the 50 different tiles in the game and figuring out how to research all of the things to get victory points. But this sounds boring you say because victory points are boring. But what if I told you the victory points aren’t just victory points? In this game, all the victory points are attached to cards you get. And these cards directly represent the number of cubes you have that produce these goods. And every single one of these cards has icons at the top that you need to “produce” to complete, and after you complete them at anytime you can use them to get yourself a cool new 1-time use bonus. A 1-time use bonus! It’s a euro!
The end of the game is triggered when one player finishes all their cards. Simple!
Not so fast you guy. During the game, cards, actions, and other actions will give you more cubes to play with so you can do more on your turn without running out of them, and getting cubes means more cards! Cards! That means doing well in the game will generate more cards to get more points. Points! But wouldn’t that mean the game would never end because of this constant influx of cards? Cards? The game would never end and it would be impossible to actually finish this game! No, not really. Eventually the actions will out pace the cards and actions that give you cubes. bs!
So why is this game my favorite game of 2021? Why am I constantly feigning excitement through the excessive use of exclamation points? It may have to do with the incredibly unappealing visuals and set dressing that comes with calling your game Anno 1800. From the outside, there’s nothing special about the game; just another brown and bland Martin Wallace game for fans of Martin Wallace. But once you’re 10 turns into the game, you realize you just took ten turns in less than 5 minutes and you can’t even count how long it’ll take to finish getting all the materials to complete your cards. The breakneck pace of turns and the time it takes to think out your immediate next step is exhilarating. “But that can’t be the only thing that makes this game my favorite game of 2021”, you are probably not thinking. And you’d be wrong to not be not thinking that, because the magic of this game is from a little mechanic that transforms every turn into a smooth salsa juice making machine: Trading.
Not trading, Trading!
An ingenious mechanic that says, “Oh, did someone already research the material that you need to research an even better material? Well, here’s some tokens you can spend to pretend like you have it.” Literally that’s it. Some pieces of cardboard that look like the recycle symbol that let you pretend like you have that material. For spending them, you award the player who actually owns that material with a different token that may or may not be useful to them (it is for tempo reasons but not really a big point for me to talk about but they’re Gold tokens).
And that, that is truly it. Every turn you spend looking at your board, looking at everyone else board, treating it like one big shared board, and spending tokens to build your tech tree with no slowdown. Steadily accelerating due to everyone leapfrogging over each other into higher and higher techs until one player slaps their last card down onto the table to cap off the game. It’s exhilarating.
Exhilarating!