Transatlantic

A new beast is breaking the waves: steamships! Powered by coal, they defy wind and tide to take over the oceans and bring the age of sail to an end. A century from now we might regret all this coal consumption, but at this point it’s all about proving yourself the best transatlantic industrialist: buying boats, investing in lines, making cash!

In Transatlantic each player begins the game with two ships on the board (one sailing ship; one steamship carrying a cube of coal) which is divided into several regions. In your hand you have seven cards: on your turn, you simply play a card to the table and perform the action on it. The actions are pretty straightforward: add coal to your steamships, transport ships (paying coal and receiving cash), transport all ships in one region (including opponent’s ships!), buy ships from the market, copy another player’s just-played card, and invest. Invest is kind of a double-action. It lets you place a trade house in a region, and whenever your ships in that region transport, they’ll score points: the amount of ships transporting multiplied by the amount of trade houses you have there.

Secondly investing gives you shares: you add the shares of the colour you chose (green: freight, red: passengers, white: mail, black: coal) to your personal investment board, and these will pay out points for you at the end of the game, or when a ship is too old and gets bumped out of an ocean by a freshly-minted boat. Note at this point that every ship has a colour. and matching-coloured ships are considered part of the same line.

Your seventh card is the Director: this does two things as well, firstly enabling you to return all your played cards to your hand and secondly adding a new card (and instantly playing it) from a face-up display. These cards are all improvements on the basic cards you started the game with, so getting one that suits your strategy is key.

Whenever someone buys ships from the market, the lowest-valued ship left over gets shifted to the docks. Effectively they’re out of the game, as they now can’t ever be purchased – but these ships still have an important role to play. The value of your ships either when pushed off the board, or at the end of the game, is defined by two things: your investment in that ship’s colour, and how many matching-coloured ships sit in the dock. If, for instance, you have four red ships, each one will score both the amount you invested in the red line, plus a point per matching-coloured ship in the docks.

So getting pushed out of the ocean isn’t all bad, as the ship gets one final transport for free – if it has the coal to do so – and score it before discarding from the game. The contest ends when all ships have been bought from market, and after final scoring for both ships and money, plus some bonuses for diverse investment on your player board (don’t take these lightly!) the player with the most points wins.