West Story : A Town Building Game - How to Play+Variant. Concise Clear, Complete Board Game Tutorial
Transcript
In the Wild West, build your town, improve businesses, or rob them, catch bandits, control where your actions are by how many points you have in West Story.
And today, we'll be teaching you how to play West Story, a town building game designed by Potra Dera and published by Smart Flamingo.
And hi everyone, it's Stella
and Tarant. Welcome to Me University.
And hey, if you enjoy this video after watching, like, subscribe, and comments, you know what to do. Now, let's get to the classroom.
In West's story, players are pioneers trying to make a name for themselves in the frontier towns of the old American West. Players will move from town to town and region to region and decide how they want to be remembered. Whether it be on the side of good, dealing with bandits and trading in the towns, or perhaps they'll engage in the spirit of the old Wild West with some robberies of their own. Players will build up points through their actions on the board and the expansion of their hometowns. And whoever scores the most points over eight rounds of play will be the winner. To set up, lay out the board. I'll first be showing you the aside.
You'll fill all of these empty spaces with the relevant tiles. There are the bandits placed face down, the wanted posters placed face up, the jokers placed in stacks of equal size to the player account, the licenses shuffled and placed face up in each space matching your play account. and the businesses. Take only the ones which match your player count, placing one per town in a two-player game and also covering the printed closed signs at three or four. Return all unplaced tiles to the box. You'll create a face up market of cards for the level ones and twos. Simply shuffle each full deck and lay out a market of four.
For the level threes, you'll have six copies each of several different buildings and you'll choose six of them to make your deck. You can choose a recommended set from the rule book or use the randomizer cards to make your choice. But whatever you do, gather up the six choices of card, shuffle them together, and likewise deal out four. make central supplies of the resources, cattle, coins, and anvils. Each player takes a hometown board with eight of their colored discs, a ninth disc placed on zero on the helper track, 12 gray activation markers, and their cowboy pawn placed at zero on the track.
Also, flip these two bandits nearest the start space beside the board. Create the sheriff stack, which determines first player during the game. Assemble by laying card eight, then cards five through seven in any order, then cards 1 through four in any order, and then flipping the top card. Whichever player has this symbol in this position of their hometown board, or if nobody does, then in the leftmost slot among these positions on their boards will be the rounds first player with turn order going clockwise. Each player will begin with five resources. For the first player, that's one cattle and four coins. For second, it's two cattle and three coins. Three cattle, two coins for third. And four cattle, one coin for fourth.
Prepare the dice on this tile near the central board. And you're now ready to play. Yeehaw. Let's learn how to make our name in the Old West.
Hold on, cowboy. Before we get into the steps of how to play, there's a few of background concepts that we need to explain first. West's story plays on this map of the Old West. The map is split into seven differently colored regions and also present are four towns. The town which is accessible from a given region is called its nearest town. Deadwood and Fort Worth are nearest to the teal and blue regions respectively. Amarillo is nearest to the two green regions and Dodge City is nearest to both the gold and orange regions. The desert region has no nearest town.
The aim of the game is to earn the most victory points by the end of eight rounds represented by the star. The gold star represents points gained immediately and you'll move your cowboy around the track. The silver star will be points gained at the end of the game. You do not move immediately. You'll add those points after round eight. The big twist in West story is that the victory point track and the map are linked. Each of the regions is associated with a subsection of the points track through the game. as you gain immediate victory points. This represents your cowboy moving on to a new location and potentially making new discoveries on behalf of everyone. That is, the first time any player enters a new region, the bandits in that region are flipped face up.
As you play the game and take actions, any actions associated with a location must be taken in the region or its nearest town where your cowboy is currently based. This has important timing implications for the game. If you want to take a lot of actions in a given region, you'll need to slow down your victory point generation in order to stay there long enough to do so. Do note, you'll likely find that the game's eight rounds are enough time to get around the board roughly once. There are three types of resource in the game. Coins, helpers, and cattle. Coins are simply gained from and spent to the general supply. You can hold any amount, and you can carry it over from round to round.
Helpers, who are the workers accompanying you, are tracked on this track as you gain or spend them. You may hold at most six at a time with any subsequent helpers gained converting into a victory point. Helpers cannot be carried over from round to round. If you get to the end of a round and you still have helpers, you lose them down to zero as they go off looking for other work. Cattle like coins are gained from and spent to the general supply and they can be carried over from round to round. However, you cannot hold more than six. Again, any excess gained will convert to victory points. None of the game's actions specifically cost cattle. Rather, cattle can be spent as wild for either a coin or a helper.
Throughout play, any loan icon or icon with a black number represents a gain. Icons next to a white number represents a cost. West story plays over eight rounds and each round plays in three phases. First, the hometown phase where the dice are rolled and all players gain a benefit based on the same roll of dice. Second is the cowboy phase where in turn order each player takes actions and buys cards. And third is the election of a new sheriff in which the first player marker rotates to whoever best meets this round's sheriff objective. And you'll do some tidy up and reset ahead of next round.
First is the hometown phase. The sheriff rolls the two dice and then all players will play those two numbers. In this case, it's three on yellow and two on green. Each die relates to a specific card among the 12 visible in your hometown. Now, to begin the game, these cards are all preprinted, but as we'll see later, you'll be covering these slots up with the cards you buy from the market. At its most basic, what you'll be doing in this phase is activating two cards by marking them in their centers. So, here it's three yellow and two green. Gaining the benefits shown in the brown bars.
So, here, three helpers and one coin. And then moving the activation markers to the locked spaces in the lower left corners of the cards. This three-step process makes sure you don't get confused. On this subsequent rounds roll, for example, I would mark four and five in the center, which distinguishes them from the cards which are already locked before gaining the newly activated cards rewards and locking them. The dice cannot reactivate a card which is already locked. If you do end up rolling a locked card, then move the activation token to the next card to the right and keep going until you reach an unlocked card. This could include wrapping around from space 6 to space one.
After confirming which two cards are activated by the dice, check the icons in their lower left corners. If there is a match of icons here, for example, they're both feathers, then as a reward, you get to activate a third card, which shows that same matching icon. The card must be unlocked to choose it. And if you have no card of the matching icon available, you instead gain one cattle. If you make multiple matches, some of the upgraded cards have two icons in their lower corners, you still gain only a single bonus activation. If at any time you fill the sixth lock space within a single row, then unlock all of those cards.
This is true during the hometown phase and during any other phase. The second phase of a round is the cowboy phase.
This is when players will take the majority of their actions and gain most of their points. The cowboy phase resolves in turns clockwise from the current sheriff with each player taking one turn for the phase. On your turn, you may take two different main actions from among the five different main actions available in the game. and then you may purchase two cards from the market. For every action you do not take or card you choose not to buy, you gain one cattle. That means you could, for example, spend your entire cowboy phase turn gaining four cattle. Cattle gained by foregoing earlier actions or buys can be spent on later actions or buys.
The first main action is raid, and this puts you on the side of the law as you attempt to capture bandits. Bandit tiles are always flipped face up as soon as any player enters a region. To take this action, there must still be a bandit token present in your region. This captured bandit space must be empty on your playerboard. And you must pay the raid cost, which is two helpers if the bandits icon does not match the wanted poster in the region's nearest town, or three helpers if it does match. Pay the cost. Take the bandit without replenishing the empty space. Place it in your captured bandit space. And then you must activate one card in your hometown whose icon matches the icon on that bandit.
As you did in the hometown phase, gain whatever is in the production bar and then lock the card. Doing this activation is mandatory. Now, to be clear, you'll almost always want to do this since activating a card is very rarely a bad thing, but the point is that you must have a card of the matching icon available to activate. If you have no matching cards, or you do, but they're all locked, then you cannot capture that bandit. The second and somewhat related action is behind bars. You must currently have a captured bandit and be located in a region with a nearest town. It's the town where you'll find the jail.
Gain that bandit's bounty. Check its icon against the nearest town's wanted poster. Gaining four points and two coins if there is not a match or four points and four coins if there is a match. You're free to both capture and jail a bandit within the same region or capture them and transport them elsewhere to jail them. Flip your captured bandit face down into your jailed stack. This frees up your captured bandit space for more raids, while the bandits you've jailed may come in handy for winning the role of sheriff later on.
Be a good cowboy and capture those bandits. Now, the third action is business in town. And this is where you'll either build up the economy of these frontier towns or perhaps rob them for short-term personal gain.
Does that mean you're in cahoot with those bandits?
For this action, you can do business in the nearest town to your region. These business tiles, as well as any printed businesses on the board, are the valid targets for your actions. Your first option is to build a trading post. Pay the town's trading post cost. Here it's a helper and two coins. And then place one of your business discs player side up on any one of the available circles. Take note of its icon. And as you did with raiding, you must now activate a card that shows the matching icon before locking it. The businesses may show the four card icons we've seen already.
They may show a joker, meaning you could activate any card of your choice. Or they may show the building or animal icon. These would mean specifically to activate a building card. This is what you'll find in the level three deck. Or an animal card, which you'll find in the level two deck. The animal cards are the scarcest and each time you pick one, it will come with some other benefit. Here, for example, it's an additional three points. At the end of the game, represented by the campfire, you will gain victory points based on how many trading posts you have within a given town. Your other option is to rob a business.
Just like the trading post action, you choose one of the businesses in this town and you'll put one of your business discs on it. However, you'll flip it over to the robbery side. You must activate a matching card on your hometown just like if you'd built the trading post, but you don't pay the trade post cost, and you won't gain these endgame points. As you continue your journey through the west, you'll encounter the desert.
The desert has no nearest towns, and the actions you can take there are a little bit different. Arguably, your most important action in the desert is the fifth main action to buy a new license. At the start of the game, your playerboard has a preprinted license. And if that stays there uncovered until the end of the game, it will grant you one endame point for each matching icon you have in your hometown. Once per game with this action, you may spend five coins to upgrade this to a better license, picking any one among those available and covering the printed one.
This is now worth three points for each pair of the two matching icons you gain. Just be warned that only icons on this beige background count towards this score. Preprinted icons or icons on this gray background all show this no campfire icon, meaning they don't count to any endame scoring. Now, the desert may not have a nearest town, but you can still create a trade post there using this special skill box. With this one, you can establish a trading post by train. Pick any town on the map where you already have at least one trade post. Pay that town's standard trade post cost plus an additional two coins for the train fair. and play the trade post down, activating a matching card as usual.
You could also choose to rob the train. This is its own special additional action. Spend any number of your helpers to gain the same number of coins. To really increase your profits, if you have a captured bandit, you may release them, setting them loose on the train for an extra three coins. The bandits then escape into the desert, return them to the box. Once you've taken your two different actions, you may then buy up to two cards. To buy a card, pay the cost showing in its top left corner in helpers and coins. When you buy two cards, purchase both before replenishing at the end of your turn.
Place each newly purchased card into any slot of your hometown which is not currently locked. This could include covering a preprinted card or a card that you've previously gained. Now, most importantly, immediately gain the victory points on the card you've just purchased. Now, remember to do this because it's very easy to forget. In most of the deck or tableau building games you've played, you're probably used to counting up all of your card points at game's end. But in West Story, this is the main way you get points during the game and therefore the main way you advance your cowboy around the map. Remember, you can always forego some or all of the points if you want to stay in a specific region.
The card market also relates to the last among the five main actions which I haven't discussed yet, which is market swindle. You may take this action regardless of where your cowboy is on the map. And it allows you to do two things in either order. The first is to discard any number of cards from a single row, returning them to the bottom of the deck and replenishing. And the second is reserving one card from the market. Place it in your reserved card slot. You may buy it with one of your card buyers on a future round. Those are the main things you'll do on your turn. But there's some other things to learn about. Twice during the game.
As you advance around the track, you'll pass one of these stacks of jokers, allowing you to collect the joker token. You may spend a joker to change the icon on a card for a single action. There are many reasons you might want to do that. For example, you may want to change an icon so that you can activate a specific card when you get a bandit or do a trade post. Or during the hometown phase, you might want to change an icon either to create a favorable matching pair here, for example, making it two cactus icons to activate this or to achieve the same outcome a different way. Changing this card to a feather so it can be activated by the feather pair.
You could even hold it back till endame scoring to change a single icon for your license scoring. Be aware that these matching pair combo bonuses are only ever triggered by the dice. I've shown you a lot of different ways to activate cards during your cowboy phase. But even if across the turn you activate multiple cards of the same icon, they will not cause a combo. It's only the two cards chosen by the dice. Many of the game's upgrade cards include not just a brown production bar, but also a gray skill bar. When you activate one of these cards, take the production immediately, but mark the skill with an anvil.
This occurs whether the card was activated by a die or by a triggered effect. The anvil represents that the skill is available to use from now until the end of your turn. And there are three different types of skills. The plus icon is an additional action. It means that you can take the action printed on that card as if it were a third main action, taking it before, between, or after your two actions. Then remove the anvil. An upgrade skill enhances one of the other actions in the game. Here, for example, it's allowing you to upgrade one of your two card purchases by giving you a discount if you purchase an animal.
The tilda represents a passive skill, and this would allow you to gain a certain bonus every time the trigger occurs during this turn. Once all players have taken their cowboy phase turns,
it's time to elect a new sheriff.
Check the current rounds sheriff objective. In the first four rounds, it will be whoever has the most visible icons of a certain type on their 12 hometown cards. In rounds five through seven, you'll be rewarded for building cards, trading posts, or jailed bandits. While there'll be no new sheriff in round eight, give the sheriff token to whoever meets the objective with ties broken by whoever is later in the current round's turn order, and the sheriff gains one coin as reward. Do note the sheriff also has a special benefit when encountering one of these specific bandits in raiding. This type of bandit isn't captured like a standard one. It's simply a reward where if the sheriff encounters them and takes the raid action, then the sheriff may activate any card in their hometown before this gang of bandits rides on to the next region.
Now reset for the next round. Reveal the next sheriff card. Remove any anvils still on player cards and reset all players helpers to zero. After the eighth round, the game is over. To the points gained during the game, players gain points based on how many trading posts they have on each of the four towns, then score their license and their animals. To do this, you can clear off all the cards you've purchased throughout the game and display them beside your board. This is because for endgame scoring, every card you've ever purchased will contribute to scoring regardless of whether or not it was covered.
If you still have the basic license, score one point for each matching icon. If you've upgraded, score three points for each pair of the two icons shown. Every animal card has an endame scoring objective, and you score the points for those. The player with the highest score wins. If tied, the sheriff wins. And if the sheriff was not among the tied players, whoever was latest in the final round's turn order breaks the tie. The rules I've just described are the basic mode of play. There are a few variants which come with the base game not requiring any expansions. You can play the advanced variants and this has two changes to the rules.
Firstly, flip over the dice tile. Now, in each hometown phase, after the dice have been rolled, players must play those two numbers, but are not limited to playing them in those colors. Here, I'd have the choice to play four and six or six and four. The second is that you're now further on the side of good and there is greater discouragement to robbery. There's no change to how you take a robbery action during the game, but at the end of the game, you will lose two points for each robbery you carried out. There's also the B side of the board, which has a few unique features. There's the special double towns of Bleakston and Old Blickston. These two towns act and are evaluated separately when it comes to final scoring. However, both of them count as being a nearest town to these three regions.
There is no longer a desert region, but the couple of desert actions can still be taken. Specifically, trading by train here in Loneill Creek and buying licenses. The difference is that the licenses are split between two regions and you can only buy one from the region you're currently in. There's also the special fort region in blue on the left hand side of the map. This has no nearest town, but it does have a jail, meaning that you can put any bandit behind bars here and gain the larger reward since in the fort every bandit is wanted. Thanks for watching and if you like this video, maybe you like to watch this next one. Have a great day.