Glasgow Review - Chairman of the Board

hey everybody today i'm taking a look at glasgow which is a two player only board game published by lookout games and designed by mandela fernandez grand on this one takes around 30 minutes to play on average so the key mechanisms of this game are tire placement resource management and you've got a little bit of a rondelle here as well as you can see the setup looks like this we have this big wheel of tiles and you've got two different types of tiles you've got the ones with these people on which is essentially how you're going to collect resources and you've also got these architect tiles which you visit in order to build buildings by cashing in the resources and getting victory points and victory points is going to be the way you get or with the way you win the game and each player is also going to have their own personal player ball that looks like this which basically shows the capacity in which you can store resources you can see at any time i can store up to five bricks four steel three gold and one of these wild barrels now the way the game is going to work is going to be rather simple where the person furthest back on the rondelle is going to get to move their player piece onto any of the available spaces and you cannot share them unless you are on one of these architectures where there's two spaces but let's just say this blue player wanted to land in this spot here therefore they would take a brick and a steel and then they'll place that onto their personal player board like so again putting the matching resources on the matching spot now because they are forward in the queue now whoever's furthest back gets to go next so therefore this player might want to maybe take the steel or maybe take a gold or maybe even take some other actions to refresh buildings or take maybe one of your choice or get a a double action here or this one even lets you activate previously built um factories which i'll explain later so you've got this idea of you know how far do you want to go because you won't you'll get another turn until you are overlapped by the other player let's just say the green player went here and took one of these gold coins into their personal player board and then it'll be the blue players turn again and so on until you've collected enough resource in order to build a building so let's say the green player visited this architect because they had the intention of building this tile here and to do that they would spend their three brick from their personal board like so put it back into the supply and then they can take that tile and place it somewhere on this city in the central table now this city is going to be communally built between you and your opponent and it's gonna eventually consist of a four by five grid and when you do that you're gonna once you paid the resource you can place it anywhere you want but you're gonna put the arrow pointing towards you to show that that building belongs to you and these buildings are all going to score in different ways so for example this one here that i've just built it's always going to get you a point at the end of the game but also if i build it in a corner of glasgow then i'm going to get i'm going to get an additional five points so these ones are really good towards the end of the game where you know what the grid is going to look like and you can get it snuck into those corners you've also got ones like this where the more you build them or that type of building you're going to get more points based on the sliding scale you've got ones that are just straight up victory points and again you've got another one in the corner here and you also have these factories and these factories are kind of one of the key mechanisms of the game so let's just say in a future turn the blue player built on this this row here or this column here you're gonna have a look at any factory which again these these shaped buildings i'm in that row or column and then depending on who the owner is of that building they're going to get the depicted resource so you can see here that the green player would get a steel resource just passively and the blue player would get one of these barrels which is a wild resource additionally if you want to build multiple buildings in a single action you can do so but each time you do you're going to have to spend an additional gold coin and that is essentially how the game is going to work who is furthest behind on the time track takes the next turn collecting resources cashing those resources into build buildings and once that four by five or five by four grid is complete then final points are going to be tallied and the person with the most victory points is going to be the winner now there are a few other buildings which i didn't touch upon earlier such as these ones here which offers end game points based on resources you have left over so this one says for each gold coin i have left i'm gonna get i'm gonna get a bonus three points or for bricks i'm going to get one point and these ones here mean that for each set of the different types of buildings you're going to get a bonus 10 points this one here is for if you have like duplicate buildings next to each other of these of this type then you score a bonus three points or even this one here which gets you two points for each factory you have okay so let's get into the review of glasgow so you can probably see there from the little demo that this game has a lot of things that feel quite familiar to games of this type you know general resource management um but i do like the fact that you do have a strict capacity on what you can keep meaning that you have to play quite efficiently especially when it comes to things such as the factories in the center of the table because if you if you're placing a tile and you'd activate a bunch of your factories then you want to make sure that you're not wasting that and making sure you have the space to actually keep those resources in again and not to waste that move um the time track mechanism works quite well in this one i think it's a cool kind of mechanism anyway and i've not really ever seen it not land too well the idea of going as far as you want but not taking another turn until you're overlapped but i would say that i never really felt like there was those big jumps or those big incentives to go really far on the time track because there's a particularly strong tile that you want now they're all pretty simple in what they do you just get resources you know there's like two brick ones here there's just a brick and a steel um there's some ones like this that you convert goods into other goods or this one here that lets you draw the next building potentially take a resource from it or even build it straight away if you have that ability um i suppose there's a little bit of a rush sometimes for particular buildings that come out you know if you want a specific one maybe you've got the one in the corner that you want to build and before the other person gets there you might take a little bit of a further jump but generally i felt you were crawling along rather than jumping significantly meaning that your opponent will get lots of turns that didn't really happen too often in the games i've played of glasgow now one of the things that intrigued me most about glasgow was the idea of building these factories i love this idea of you know when you're communally building this city together when you place a tile you can potentially be offering your opponent some resources and that's going to make you think twice about some places because maybe you want to get a very particular tile in a corner but that's going to activate a bunch of your opponent's um buildings and give them a big influx of resources without doing any work now i love that idea that kind of spinning place and what you're going to do what's going to benefit you the most but i would say that didn't really come across as well as as well as i would have liked and because the resources generally are quite generous and how to get them and you can gather gather them pretty quickly um i didn't really feel like there was that much of a desire or urge to keep building these factories because you could just get the resources by other means anyway and um you're probably gonna go more for the points because you know the factors don't generally offer you many points and they don't really pay the big dividends that you'd want them to you'd rather just go for a big grab of points and win the game that way rather than investing in some kind of resource gathering infrastructure so yeah i would have thought that this would have worked a bit better in practice and it did fall a little bit flat and i found that it was always neglected in favor of just getting victory points so despite the game being up to scratch in terms of how it functions mechanically i don't feel like it does anything new or terribly exciting they are all things that we've seen before and when it tries to do something a bit different in terms of the communal city building it doesn't quite pull it off as i would have liked now that being said the game is quite snappy it only takes around 30 minutes to play maximum and there's not really any downtime either you're pretty much always taking turns and grabbing resources quickly converting them into buildings and so on but the decisions on the back of that didn't quite feel meaty or exciting enough it pretty much just felt like gather gather spend gather gather spend and not really having too much depth or strategy into what you're doing i'm just grabbing the next best tile and i'm cashing in those resources so i didn't really feel that there's a lot of things to explore here lots of things to rack your brains over or terribly difficult decisions to be made i think the player interaction in glasgow could be better to be honest i generally find that the best games to pull off this time track mechanism now the idea of the person behind keeps taking turns until up um the best game to those tend to have certain locations to go to that are so juicy and so um so inviting to go to that you can't help but jump forward but kind of in contrast to that leave your opponent a bunch of turns to catch up and you know understanding what the benefit or who's going to benefit the most out of each move is where it shines this one they always felt like there was a an adequate option to be taken and i always found myself just crawling along and not having that kind of thought space of what am i leaving my opponent here it didn't really matter too much because there's always a next viable option so i did think that kind of diminished the interaction somewhat i thought the the tenseness of getting to certain spots on the bob was okay in terms of the map you know maybe you're building a bunch of um the buildings that work well by being next to each other and then your opponent just ruins their plans by shoving something in the middle so you don't benefit anymore so that kind of stuff is fine but it just felt a little bit lackluster and didn't really shine to the point where i would have liked it the production for glasgow is generally fine i've got no issue at all with the way that any of these tiles look they're nice and clear in terms of their iconography and the buildings themselves are all quite easy to work out what they do and how they score and the resources themselves are decent you know they're all different shapes they're not just little cubes and the other particularly the the barrel looks good so yeah i've got no real issue with the production at all and even the nice big chunky meeples are cool to play with so yeah um for a little two-player game in a small box the production for this game is is pretty damn good i'm also not terribly impressed in relation to the replayability of the game i don't feel like there's enough going on here to sink your teeth into enough here to keep you coming back to this one it's always gonna feel like you're doing the same thing again gather gather gather spend and take the um the best available building available to you so yeah i don't really feel like there's much scope to explore new territory try new things and to keep you coming back to this one which is a bit of a shame okay so final thoughts on glasgow so i suppose objectively there's nothing terribly wrong with this game i just wasn't excited about anything this game offered i felt like there's 50 games of this type already out there and i've already played it before i even had played it so i suppose if you're looking for a very simple bare bones resource collection resource management style game now this one could be an option you know maybe if you play with a a non-dedicated gamer partner or something this is cool because you know instead of kind of cashing in these resources for points and contracts you're actually building buildings communally to to make this a little bit of a puzzle and the score points a different way so i did like the idea and the concept here but for me i really would have wanted to see this factory mechanism exploited more and to be a more significant part of the game rather than just people ignoring it and going for the points instead and that also ties to the time track mechanism i've seen it done so much better in other games where that tension and that urge to push further is stronger well in this one you can just kind of trickle along at your own pace and just collect those resources without caring too much about what your opponent does so again all these little things just kind of detracted from me and made me feel like this one was a bit of a pass and i'm not saying it's a bad game because it's not for me it's just not something special and not something i got my way to recommend just feels like another game in a sea of thousands of them so that is my final thoughts on glasgow sadly can't ultimately recommend this one