Grand Austria Hotel

In this game, players are competing to turn their modest Vienna cafes -represented by individual player boards – into hotels, with the most successful being awarded the title of the ‘Grand Austria’. This ambition, however, is not pursued via flambés and furnishings, but selecting dice.

Over Grand Austria Hotel’s seven rounds, a selection of dice are rolled and then placed on an action board: all the 1s rolled go on the first action, the 2s on the second action and so on. Then players have two turns during each round, where they select a die and take the associated action – and how powerful that action is depends on how many dice are currently there. Let’s see what they do.

Actions one and two are both about making dishes in your kitchen: wine, coffee, cake and strudel are represented by different-coloured cubes. Action three allows you to make more rooms available above your cafe: you add doors (open side face-up) to your board. Action four allows you to move up the emperor track – more on him in a moment – five lets you play staff cards for ongoing or one-off benefits and action six lets you, for a small price, replicate any of the first five actions.

Naturally, you’ll be drawn towards the actions with most dice on them as these are the most powerful, but sometimes you’ll need to ignore these rewards in favour of a strategic play. Below your own board/hotel are space for three customers. You can (optionally) take a customer on your turn, and these demand the aforementioned dishes of coffee, strudel and so on: as soon as their demands are met, the customers will exit the hotel and you gain the rewards: victory points, cash, emperor track movement and so on. The customer will also ‘shut a door’ in your hotel, effectively renting it for the rest of the game. Doors are – for reasons known only to Venetian hoteliers – grouped in colours, and whenever you close the last door on a group of the same colour, you also gain some benefits: cash, points, or movement up the emperor track.

We keep mentioning the emperor track and there is a good reason to factor it in to your thinking – you have a marker that – hopefully – moves up this track in order to score points and nab bonuses at the ends of rounds 3, 5 and 7. What also happens in these bonus-triggering moments is the emperor will move everyone back down the track, as though he hates to see the gentrification of Vienna and wants to punish you all. So this is a kind of miniature battle playing out around the attracting and sating of customers, and managing tricky cashflow.

When everyone has had their two turns, all dice are rerolled and the starting player moves clockwise around the table. After the seventh round, there is some end-game scoring for staff members and occupied rooms in your hotel, then the player with the most points wins.