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Tin Goose is a game about the early years of commercial air travel. Beginning as a regional operation with just an airmail route and a "tin goose" (the Ford Trimotor), players build an airline empire through the 1930s and 40s. As the game progresses, planes improve, being safer and more fuel efficient while having a longer range. Companies become more organized and shed their early inefficiencies. The stakes of a disaster — crashes, strikes, and oil shocks — get higher.
A deck of 96 cards includes all of the planes and events that enter the game. Of these, only about 36 are played in any given session, and all of those exist in players' hands at the outset. The result is a game of "calamities" with more planning and less luck: A skillful player seeing high bids on the safest planes may guess several bidders are holding crash cards.
Tin Goose is a business game that features a balance between greed and fear, without random events. It's designed by Matt Calkins, who previously designed Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan, and will be available in print from Rio Grande Games and digitally in the Apple iTunes store.
- Strong deduction depth for a quick two-player game
- Interesting animal/color identity puzzle with bluff and information control
- Expansion adds variety and a two-player variant broadens play options
- Rule density can be a bit heavy for casual players
- Hidden-information games can be hard to teach in a casual setting
- Array
- Animal-based deduction
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- deduction — Players have hidden cards and deduce each other's animal identity and color through fights and cooperation.
- Expansion and variant modes — There is an expansion with elephant and chameleon cards; a two-player variant exists and a different six-card fight row in that mode.
- Hidden Information — Cards are hidden from other players; players reveal information through actions and fights.
- Rock-Paper-Scissors — A simplified rock-paper-scissors cycle governs which animal beats which.
- Rock-paper-scissors-like resolution — A simplified rock-paper-scissors cycle governs which animal beats which.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Sumo is a twoplayer specific trick taking game which isn't something that you see a lot.
- Isla is a rolling right game.
- This really feels like a classic card game. This really feels like the sort of game that you're going to play, you know, in your tent trailer when you're camping.
- The two-player game plays a little differently.
- There is a solo mode that plays a bit differently, too.