Boardgame Review: Tinners' Trail
Warfrog’s Game of Ore Mining in 19th-Century Cornwall
Warfrog's Tinners' Trail is divided into four turns. In each turn, players bid for the right to mine ore, attempt to maximise their ore output and plough any profits obtained into external investments. The winner is the player with the most valuable investments at the end of the game.
Gameplay
The price of the two resources (tin and copper) is determined by a dice roll at the start of each turn. Players then attempt to place mines and begin extracting ore. The cost of extracting the ore is contingent on the amount of water in each mine so players can use their actions in each turn to remove water by the addition of steam pumps, adits (drainage tunnels), ports and trains before actually mining the ore. Putting additional miners into the mines allows more ore to be extracted.
Once all players have used up all their allocated ten actions in each turn, the ore is sold and the money obtained is used in external investments. These investments have a specific number of victory points attached - which decrease as the game goes on - and the winner is the player with the most victory points at the end of the fourth turn.
Strategy
Once the price of ore has been established, players must decide where they would like to build their mines. As the cost of mining is determined by the amount of water in the mine and there is only a limited amount of money available to each player, priority should initially be given to building mines in locations where there is less water.
The right to build a mine is determined by auction once the location has been selected, so it is important to balance the need to acquire a mine against having the finances left to subsequently mine it. In addition, there are only a finite amount of resources available to assist production in each turn, so availability of these resources needs to be tracked as the mines are being built.
Once ore is extracted, more water enters the mines so the cost of mining goes up.
As the price of ore will fluctuate from turn to turn the player also needs to consider the benefits of mining in the current turn or risk waiting in the hope that the ore price will rise in subsequent turns, thus making mining more profitable.
A Good Game?
Tinners Trail achieves a balance between being accessible to the casual gamer owing to its short playing time and easy-to-learn rules and having a strategic depth that will appeal to the more hardened game player.
Although there is an element of randomness in both the determining of ore prices and amount of ore and water in the mines, this is more than outweighed by the game’s overall balance and the need to consider mine improvements against the ability to subsequently extract enough ore to make the investment profitable. Recommended.
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