Auztralia in about 3 minutes (and expansions in a few more)

0:01 this video is brought to you by castles of burgundy now live on gamefound part of our programme to promote games from aotearoa/new zealand Kia ora Koutou and welcome to auztralia in about three minutes, big box edition, review copy used it has a solo mode, it's a game for one to five players playing time is medium to long and it's a moderately complex game australia in this world, it's not the land of vegemite, steve irwin and don bradman it's the land of the great old ones, ancient horrors that need to be defeated can your british expeditionary force wipe them out the game ends once all players, including cthulhu pass 53 time the winner is the player with the most points and you get those from farms, killing monsters, phosphorus and ally cards ai: the cthulhu monsters are normally controlled by card actions action selection: each turn you will pick an action to take on your board network building: your train system restricts where you can place farms and attack player turn in auztralia each action takes time when you take an action move ahead that much time on the track the current player is the player in last place or if tied the one on top of the stack you'll start off by building your port and then taking actions let's run through those here you spend two resources to place two tracks but not in hills this one lets you do the same but costs extra time and can go into hills, place a cube on each action as you do it mine lets you take all of one resource from a hex in your network, there are two different mine actions this action lets you recruit one of the face-up allies, these can have one-off effects ongoing bonuses or provide end-game points here you can recruit units, paying their cost, we grab two troops for two gold

1:34 the trade action happens twice and you either get a basic resource or trade one resource for one gold build farms lets you build a farm in each terrain type within your network gaining one gold for each farm if you want to do an action with a marker on it pay one gold for each marker you can also use this action to clear all your markers let's look at the attack action first take the units you want to use from your barracks and put them in your attack force each of the top three types will use a time the bottom two don't different units have different ranges but use the range of the lowest here that is one pick an enemy within range and reveal them if it's a kangaroo nothing happens if it's a monster you fight it let's do a tough battle here you start each fight with three sanity tokens and then reveal a battle card cross reference the enemy you are fighting here we have no matching units but take one sanity loss and the next card we have one matching units to do one damage but take one damage to our airship progress through these cards one at a time until you defeat the monster run out of sanity or choose to retreat once the time track passes 22 the monsters will become more active , each time the market moves onto a space like this draw a card and resolve it then for each space draw two battle cards and if a unit is shown on those cards move it enemies moving into farms blight them and if an enemy reaches your port you get one last chance to fight and defeat it or you are out of the game why would you like this game?

2:47 a train game with a cthulhu theme seems like a drug-induced idea or a fever dream but weirdly it works better as a combination than it has any right to the pacing of the game is interesting as you start off with the baddies inert and have a period to build up then things start to escalate rather dramatically as the old ones get moving leading to increasingly tougher and potentially more damaging fights the action selection system is well executed with all the actions making sense and the option to pay gold to repeat actions a great decision point the allies you pick up are neat and create emergent powers and give different scoring options and each of the different units has different strengths and weaknesses which plays out well in the combat system all up a game that would appeal to thematic and eurogamers who want a taste of how the other half lives the best thing about this game is the combat card system it can get really tense especially in long battles where injuries and sanity loss are mounting however for a game about australia it is incredibly english with nods to classic british icons in it and it just can't seem to shake off the idea of australia as terra nullius despite the inclusion of some indigenous australians and some games you might wipe the monsters out leading to an anti-climactic ending for a more traditional cthulhu game try arkham horror and for more fun with trains try brass birmingham auztralia designed by a brit published by kiwi as we've got the big box to review which includes both the expansions let's take a quick look at them first off the core game does come with the western australia map which has quite a different layout revenge of the old ones includes rules for having the bad guys controlled by a player this involves several changes first of all the human players get a reinforced port that is harder to wipe out then instead of placing monsters on the board place spawn points instead the humans start with more resources and can also build outposts which are static defenses that when attacked can be instantly reinforced by a small number of units

4:22 the cthulhu player has 5 things they can spend time on to do in their turn the first is to place a monster at a spawn point they must use up all their level 1 monsters before moving to level 2. they can also reveal a monster as an action then they can draw four movement cards to see if it moves monsters must still move towards the nearest farm or port they can also draw three mythos cards and choose one to keep and finally play one mythos card for the time shown on its top left the cthulhu player gets points for blighting farms killing units and destroying ports this expansion also has an improved solo mode with a deck of cards that change up how the mythos creatures act as well as a solo campaign and solo objective cards the second expansion is tasmania and this is a two-player mode three if you include a cthulhu player the twist with this map is you can use the standard side or flip it over and then randomly generate the map leaving the seven center hexes unrevealed until later in the game neither of these expansions are absolutely necessary but if you are a solo gamer or play with two people i definitely recommend them as well as if you're someone who's played the heck out of the core game and loves it and if you enjoyed this video hit the notification button like share and subscribe to the channel