Montana
Designed by: Rüdiger Dorn
It’s the old west, and you’re competing cowpeople hoping to expand the best across the titular Montana!
The board is modular and will be bigger the more players there are. On it, the landscape of Montana is broken into hexes upon which you’ll build settlements – the catch being, each hex has a building cost, of stone, ore, grain, or even pumpkins. In the old west, they had to make do at times.
Play moves through three phases. In the first you recruit workers, which is done by spinning a wheel. Wherever the needle stops, you collect the two matching workers from the supply – the workers’ colour denotes the specific job they do. If you want to pay a grain (or several grain) you can move the needle on to the next section (or sections) of the wheel for more workers. In the next phase, you send your staff off to work – gathering resources and cash. Any colour worker may go to the bank for money, but if you want stone, ore, grain or pumpkins, you need to send the worker of the correct colour. A pumpkin farmer obviously can’t do the work of a miner, that would be even sillier than a house made of pumpkin. Players also have a surveyor piece of their own colour who is blessed with the power of negotiating for resources and paying for them with pumpkins at the city. But beware – other surveyors can outbid you.
Finally you build on the main board – spending your gathered resources to place up to three settlements, and potentially picking up little bonuses for doing so – cows, for instance, will be placed in your paddock and will come in handy later.
The game is a race of sorts – as soon as any one player gets their last settlement on the board, the current round will be the last. It’s quite possible that more than one – possibly all! – players will get all their settlements down, and those helpful bovines will serve as a tie-breaker. Bear in mind that some hexes allow you to place two settlements, and placing the fourth matching settlement in a straight line also allows you to get rid of an additional settlement! Montana, ladies and gentlemen, Montana. They love geometry here.
Sam says
I do like the games of this designer, but I think Montana suffers a little bit in comparison to his previous (very popular) Istanbul, which has a similar feel of racing to be the first to finish something. Both play pretty speedily and involve some player interaction, albeit ‘blocking’ each other is more brutal in Montana. But Istanbul feels like a neater design mechanically. I think for a game of producing and building I’d choose the recent Pioneers or a venerable classic like Stone Age over it. But – what it has over those games is speedier play, which will suit many groups more, families especially (if they’re ok with the streak of feistiness here). Even with four, once you’re familiar with the rules Montana is done and dusted in under an hour, and not many games about continental settlement can say that.
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Take That!
Yes! Surprisingly for a game about settling down with some cows, Montana proves to be a bit feisty. Players can outbid each other in the city, and beat each other to a juicy spot on the board, and turn order is very important.
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Fidget Factor!
Once you know the game, low. Although you may have to change plans midstream when you see the first player is going to build where you really wanted to, it's not a game that will bewilder you with options.
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Brain Burn!
The basic premise here is collect resources to build. That is very very simple. The extra thought comes in from the player interaction - seeing who plans to do what on the main board.
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Again Again!
There are no cards or dice involved, but set-up is random.
