Players: 2-4
Time: 30-45 minutes
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)

This edition of La Strada was simultaneously produced by Mayfair Games and Kosmos.

The Components

La Strada comes with:

• The Board:
  • 4 board edge pieces
  • 4 connectors
  • 6 land tiles
• The Tiles:
  • 8 workshop tiles
  • 19 settlement tiles
  • 124 road tiles
• 4 resource markers
• 48 merchant cubes
• 1 rulebook

The Board: All of the components for the board are printed full-color on heavy, linen-textured cardboard.

Four "edge pieces" form the frame of the map. When put together they display a ten-point resource record track on each edge (one per player) and a scoring box in each corner (one each for cities, towns, villages, and hamlets). The four edge pieces are connected with little jigsaw connectors.

Six land tiles are randomly shuffled into this frame. They each feature 21 or 22 hexes and when put together they form a mega-hex that's 7 hexes on a side. Each one other than the 22-hex starting tile can be rotated in three directions, and can also be placed in one of six locations. Thus there's a decent amount of variability introduced by these six tiles, which is of course the point.

Overall, the constructed board is high-quality and nice to look at it. It's also very green, an aesthetic decision which has some usability results which I talk about in The Tiles, below. Finally, the board has some usability problems of its own: the board is very cleverly constructed so that is has a scoring space in each corner, making optimal use of the layout. Each one of those scoring spaces has a number of boxes, which each show a number of merchant cubes toward the middle of the board and a gold coin value toward the edge of the board. It's all very consistent and obvious, but ... it doesn't work well in use. When you score, unless you walk around the board, half of the boxes are going to be upside down, and it's really easy, as a result, to reverse the merchant and gold coin counts, since they're about the same size and on opposite sides of the boxes. The first time we played we had to count four or five times before we got it right because of this issue. A simple line of boxes, all in the same orientation, would have worked a lot better, even if it weren't as pretty.

The lack of a scoring track to mark scoring points as you calculate them can also be a bit annoying.

The Tiles: The tiles are all printed on medium-heavy linen-textured cardboard, in full color. There are 8 workshops, which each show a little building in one of the four player colors (terra cotta red, gray, white, or yellow) and 19 settlements tiles, which each show one of the four types of settlements (city, town, village, and hamlet). Each player also gets 31 road tiles in his color, which show his road against one of the three board background types (plains, hills forest), straight on the front, curved on the back.

Overall, the tiles are all produced at a high level of quality. However, overall, they also have marked problems with contrast. They're all printed against backgrounds that match the terrain types on the board. Thus, it can take real concentration to make out which tiles are where when they're placed on the board. You shouldn't have to strain to make out a board sitting in front of you, but in La Strada you do.

I also find the 19 settlement tiles annoying. Each type (city, town, village, hamlet) has a unique picture, but there's no easy way to figure out the size of each in comparison with the others except by looking at the four scoring boxes. I had to consult them constantly during play. The towns and villages were particularly bad, because they looked to me like they were about the same size, but I even mistook hamlets for one of the larger settlement types a couple of times. More distinct illustrations would have helped a lot, or else numbers between "1" and "4". It's also hard to see the illustrations for the cities when there are cubes piled on top, thus making it even more difficult to see what's what.

The roads were pretty distinct against the backgrounds, but again they tended to blend in a bit because they were printed on the exact terrain type.

Overall, all of these tiles would have been helped by differentiation from the background, and from each other.

Resource Markers: These are simple cardboard shields intended to be placed on the resource tracks for each player.

Merchant Cubes: Simple wood cubes, more or less painted in the player colors (here, brown, black, gray, and yellow).

Rulebook: A four-page full-color rulesheet, well produced with lots of illustrations and examples.

Box & Tray: The box is a medium-sized square box that is up to normal good German quality standards, but doesn't match the size of any other box I own. The tray is nicely produced, with six individual slots for single tiles and a large inset for the land tiles. Nicely done, though oddly all the individual tile slots are too long.

As I've already alluded to, there's one overarching problem with these components: color matching. The color matching is, overall, worse than I've ever seen in a game. To take the worst example: there's a player whose resource track is clearly marked red, whose resource marker is also red, whose tiles are light brown, and whose merchants are dark brown. The other colors, for those four components, are: black/dark-gray/dark-gray/black; dirty-white/mottled-gray/light-gray/silver; and cream/pale-yellow/yellow/yellow. The problem isn't as bad as it sounds, because you always have your resource track and marker in front of you, and the merchants and tracks aren't too far off, but it's frustrating, especially in setup.

Overall, La Strada's components have two characteristics: they're well produced and beautiful to look at; and they have a variety of notable usability problems, from mismatched colors to low contrast among the pieces. If the game didn't have any usability problems, I would have simply awarded it a "5", but given that the problems make the game genuinelly harder to setup and play, I've dropped it all the way down to a high "3" out of "5" for Style.

A shame. The game still works fine, but with a little more thought on the pieces, or playtesting of the same, it would have worked great.

The Game Play

In La Strada you lay trade routes, connecting your workshop up with the most valuable settlements in Northern Italy.

Setup: The board is setup by randomly placing the six land tiles. Then, the 19 settlements are randomly placed on the 19 gray-dotted spaces on the board. This will cause the four types of settlements--cities, towns, villages, and hamlets--to be arbitrarily arranged about the game board.

Each player then selects a color and takes all of the pieces appropriate for the color (12 merchant cubes, 31 road tiles, 1 or 2 workshops, and a resource marker).

Starting with the first player, each player places one workshop on the board; it must not be adjacent to any other workshop (and, according to the game designer, though not the rules, it shouldn't be adjacent to any settlement either). The second workshop is only used for two-player games, as discussed below.

Order of Play: Each player now takes the following actions on his turn:

1. Record Resources
2. Play Tiles

Record Resources: The player adds 6 to his resource record track, up to a total of 10. (Note that this means you can carry over up to 4 resources from the previous round without losing anything.)

Play Tiles: In order to play road tiles, connecting settlements, a player must expend resources. It costs 2 resources to play on a plain , 3 on a forest, and 4 on a hill. In order to build you must be able to pay for and lay all of the tiles required to get you from a current settlement (or your workshop) to a new settlement; there's no partial route building in this game.

Note that there are no "branches" and no "cross-over" road tiles. This means that the only way you can branch your trade routes is through settlements. You can build up to six trade routes from each city, presuming no one else gets there.

Also note that there are only two types of roads: straight and sixty-degree turn. The lack of a one-hundred-and-twenty-degree turn road can be an issue on occasion.

There are a couple of additional rules for road building:

1. Each road must be part of the connected network that includes your workshop.
2. You can't connect up to anyone else's workshop
3. There can only be one tile per space.
4. The background of the tile must match the background of the space you're building on (hill, forest, or plain).

When you connect to a new settlement, you must place one merchant cube there. The more players who have merchant cubes ona single settlement, the less valuable it is to each of them. (The laws of diminishing returns apparently beat out the theories of improved production through capitalism in Northern Italy.)

Ending the Game: The game ends when one player can't possibly connect to any more settlements. This means that: he dosen't have any merchant cubes left; or having a full 10 resources wouldn't get him to any more settlements; or he's prevented from getting to any new settlements because he's out of a specific type of road (e.g., hill roads or forest roads). At this point, all settlements are scored.

The score of a settlement is based on its size and the number of merchants (players) there, as noted on the following chart:

For easy scoring, all of the merchants from each settlement are tossed into the appropriate scoring box for the appropriate settlement size, then each player totals up the value of all his merchants, hopefully remembering when to read rightside-up and when to read upside-down.

The player with the most points is the winner.

Two-Player Variant: For two players, each player starts off with both of his workshops and can use the tracks and merchant cubes from two different colors (if he needs that many). Only one player may place a merchant in each settlement, but either player can build through a settlement. The game goes until each of the settlements has a merchant in it.

Relationships to Other Games

La Strada (2004) is a simple connection-building game. It shares the most similarity to TransAmerica (2002), a casual connection-building railroad game. Like TransAmerica, La Strada is a casual filler game that can be played in 30-40 minutes. Unlike TransAmerica, La Strada is a strategic game with a relatively low random factor. Overall, I think La Strada is a better game unless you're trying to appeal to a very casual crowd, or else to play with 5 or more players.

La Strada is by Martin Wallace who has released a whole slew of railroad games through his own company, Warfrog. His much more strategically complex game, Age of Steam (2002), continues to be one of the most acclaimed railroad games ever released (in tight contention with recent Ticket to Ride (2004)). La Strada is a railroad game in all but the final theming; it has very little in common with true trade route games, such as Hansa (2004) and Serenissima (1996).

La Strada's resource-point system is essentially a very simple action-point system. Like other recent release, Hansa, it allows players to carry those action points from one round to the next.

The Game Design

Overall, other than component-induced contrast problems, La Strada plays well. Here's some of the top game design:

Good Filler: La Strada is easy to understand, easy to play, and thus makes for a very good filler game.

Nice Strategy: Despite the simplicity, there's some nice strategy implicit. Because of limited board positions, you can plan ways to beat opponents to cities and/or cut them off. Determining ways to maintain monopolies also creates a good additional level of strategy.

Two Player Game Works Well: The two-player game is a fair amount simpler than the three- or four-player game, but I still think that it offers for a very enjoyable and quick game. It's a nicely produced variant.

Here's one issue that I'm undecided on:

Starting Position May Offer Benefits: It's possible that the first player(s) in the game might have an advantage due to the opportunity for superior board placement, though I haven't played enough to be confident. If this is the case, probably the resource points should be tiered, so the first player gets less and the last player more, on the first turn.

Here's some issues I had with the game:

End Game Awkward: The end game for the 3-4 player game feels very awkward. First, because it becomes increasingly hard to eyeball whether you have legal moves. Second, because at the end game you may have to do increasingly annoying moves, just because you can. I'd have been happier if a more elegant mechanism had been determined to trigger game end.

Some AP: There's the possibility for some analysis paralysis, because of the number of possibilities available to a player on a turn, but it's fairly minor.

Overall, I think La Strada is an above average little filler game. I give it a "4" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

If you enjoy connection-building games, and you're looking for something shorter than Ticket to Ride, La Strada is a great option. My only hesitation in recommending it has to do with the various issues I note regarding the components. Nonetheless, I don't think any of them are deal breakers. The game plays despite the problems, it just could have played much better.

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