Players: 3-4
Playing Time: 60-90 minutes

Tinners' Trail was published in a limited print run of 1500 copies, sold directly by Warfrog Games. Though it's no longer available from Warfrog, you may still be able to get copies from sites like funagain.com and Boards & Bits--but you should try and do so quickly if you're interested. Otherwise, it'll probably be back in print from a new publisher sometime in the future.

The Game Components

Tinners' Trail comes in the slim bookshelf size that's been standard for Warfrog. It includes:

Game Board: A 6-panel gameboard that shows Cornwall. The map is a plain but attractive design by Peter Dennis. The board also contains a ton of other information including tracks for money, order of play, and turn order, plus some information on what mine improvements can be purchased and a chart of the potential prices for ore.

The information is laid out relatively uniquely with text going in three different directions. A few of our players found this a bit off-putting at first, but I loved it. I'm always aware of which direction the text on a board faces and who will be reading upside down. (It's usually me.) I think it's great that Tinners' Trail tries to balance this out.

On the downside I found the money track of Tinners' Trail very frustrating. There are actually two tracks, one running 0-19# and one starting at 0# and going up in increments of 20#. You keep a marker on each to measure your total. However, this is by no means intuitive, and in both games I played players had to make an extra effort to count money. This is a minor issue, but it's something that will continue to be a minor issue. In my experience tens-and-ones tracks never work (and a twenties-and-ones tracks is even worse, because people rarely count in base-20).

Wood Bits: Treefrog is a new label for Warfrog games, and one of their hallmarks is that all the playing pieces will be wooden, which is indeed the case here. There is in fact a a huge pile of attractively cut wood in the box.

Some of the components are simple. There are 160 cubes that denote the output of mines: water, copper, and tin. Among the components that each player gets there are some similarly simple pieces, including: 12 square investment cubes and three discs used to mark money and time. However, beyond that the wood bits start getting pretty intricate and cool-looking.

For example, each player gets 6 mines, which are cut to look like little houses with chimneys. The technology bits are even more complex, including 10 miner pieces that look like little people, 8 ports that look like boats, and 3 trains that look like ... well, trains. This is the second game I've seen recently that uses such intricate wood bits; they wowed a number of my players.

Finishing out the wood bits are some wooden dice--which are custom made for the game and which generate levels of copper, tin, and water production.

Overall, the components of Tinners' Trail are attractive and good effort has been expended to make the board easy to use. I also find the pile of wood bits impressive in both quality and quantity. I've given Tinners' Trail a high "4" out of "5" for Style: well above average, and verging on excellent.

The Gameplay

The object of Tinners' Trail is to make the most money from cunning investments, using money raised by plumbing the mines of Cornwall.

Setup: The majority of the territories on the board are seeded with the three things you find in Cornwall mines: tin, copper, and water. First one or two tin cubes are placed on each starting mining space, as labeled on the board. Then, three three dice are rolled, which results in 0-3 tin, 0-3 copper, and 2-4 water being placed on each of these spaces.

Each player starts with 15# as well as 6 mines and 12 investment cubes, ready to be used.

Order of Play: The game is played out over four turns, each of which contains six phases:

1. Determine ore prices
2. Available developments
3. Player actions
4. Sell ore
5. External investments
6. Prospect

Determine Ore Prices: The dice are rolled to randomly determine the prices of the two ores. Copper is quite variable, running from 2# to #10. Tin is more stable, running from 4# to 7#.

There are some slight variations to this: the ores are more valuable at the start of the game and less valuable at the end of the game or if they recently had high value.

Available Developments: A set of developments including miners, ports, adits, trains, and water pumps are laid out. Exactly what goes out is determine by the turn: more of everything appears as the game goes on, with trains not appearing at all until turn three.

Player Actions: This is the heart of the gameplay. Each player has up to ten units of time which they can use to take actions, with an individual action taking from 1-3 time units. The order of play is unusual, with the player who has the most time left going first. Eventually players will "pass", either because they're totally out of time or because they want to be one of the first people to go on the next turn.

Here's the possible actions:

Build Mine (2). A player puts a mine up for bid. It's then auctioned around the table until every one but one player drops out. That player pays his bid to the bank. The player who actually wins the mine pays the 2 time-unit cost, unlike all the other actions where the active player is the one who pends time.

Buy Development (1-3). A player buys a development that's available. The development is then placed in a specific space. This can immediately remove water, can immediately add ore, and/or can speed up mining in the future.

1. Miner (1). 1 mining capacity.
2. Port (2). 1 mining capacity. Removes 1 water.
3. Adize (3). Placed between two spaces. 1 of each ore to each connected space. Removes 1 water from each connected space.
4. Train (2). 1 mining capacity. Removes 2 water, plus 1 water from each adjacent space.
5. Water Pumps (1). Removes 1-3 water from anywhere on the board.

Mine (2). The goal of the game is ultimately to mine. To do this you choose a space and may remove 2 ore cubes, 1 per additional mining capacity. The cost of this is equal to the number of cubes you take times the number of water cubes in the space. Afterward, you add 1 water cube to the space.

The water is one of the cool elements of the game, both for the interesting economic model, where it gets harder to mine the more you mine, and also for the nice theming: the more ore you take, the deeper you have to mine, and thus the more your mine fills with water.

Sell Pasties (1). If you don't have anything better to do and don't feel the need to pass yet, you can spend 1 time unit to earn 1#.

Sell Ore: You must sell all your ore each turn at the current selling price.

External Investments: The victory points in Tinners' Trail don't come from your money, but rather from the external investments that you make with your money. Thus each turn you take some of your profit out to put into investment opportunities, being careful to leave enough for mine purchases and mining on the next turn.

This is a some-what (and I would say, unnecessarily) complex system where players one at a time place cubes on investment spaces, each of which corresponds to a certain amount of money, in 5# or 10# increments. There's a chance you could get cut out of an investment that you want, but it's relatively minor. Nonetheless, you spend a couple of actions jostling for position.

What's important here is that the earlier you make investments, the more victory points they're worth. Thus, for example, an investment of 5# is worth 6, 5, 4, or 3 VPs, depending on whether you make it on turn 1, 2, 3, or 4.

Prospect: The first two players who passed each get a turn to uncover ore in an empty space. They roll the tin, copper, and water dice and place cubes accordingly.

Winning the Game: The game ends after 4 turns. The player with the most victory points is the winner.

Relationships to Other Games

Tinners' Trail is the first release in Martin Wallace's new "Treefrog Line" of games. The Treefrog Line is so named because of the fact that they'll have all wooden components, which Tinners' Trail indeed does. However, they also represent a change from Martin Wallace's previous publications under the Warfrog name. First, Wallace plans to publish three games a year rather than one. Second, these games will be somewhat lighter in weight than Warfrog's publications.

I was somewhat leery of the fact that Treefrog was going to publish lighter games, because I've found Wallace's heavy games (like Brass and Byzantium) to be excellent, but his lighter games (like La Strada and Toledo) to be merely adequate.

Fortunately, Tinners' Trail turns out to still be quite dense. The economic engine is similar to what you'd find in other Wallace games, from Age of Steam to Brass, and if it's perhaps a little lighter than those others, it's still got plenty of depth to keep the game interesting. So, perhaps the Treefrog games will end up being lighter than the earlier Warfrog releases, but I wouldn't have found this game's change in depth notable if I hadn't been told of it in advance.

(The next Treefrog game, After the Flood, is also supposed to be even heavier than this one.)

The time system in Tinners' Trail is inspired by a similar well-received mechanic in last year's Thebes.

The Game Design

Tinners' Trail is a game of economic strategy. There's certainly a lot of tactical thought that goes into it, as you decide how to spend your time, what to pay for mines, when to expend time to reduce mining costs and when not to. However, one of its most interesting elements is the pure strategic choice of whether to seek immediate gratification (through the purchase of VPs) or to instead work on long-term growth (through the purchase of new mines and the acquisition of improvements). I've already stated that I quite like the way that water works into the mining system. The economic model is overall a nice one.

The game also gets kudos for its speed of play. Though a serious economic game, experienced players can play the game in under an hour. I think it works particularly nicely with 3 players, which causes it to go very quickly, though I have no complaints about four-player games.

If I do have one complaint, it's about the complexity of the VP-purchase system, which introduces some gamesmanship where you can try and trick opponents out of spending all the money that they want, but actually has very little effect on gameplay, particularly not for the time it can take. I think the game would have been better off without this add-on.

Nonetheless, this is a good economic game that in no way ends up being too light, as I'd feared. It earns a "4" out of "5" for Substance: above average.

Conclusion

Tinners' Trail is the first of Martin Wallace's new Treefrog Games. It continues to play to Wallace's strengths, offering interesting economic gameplay in a fun historic setting, and thus is recommended to anyone who's a fan of his older Warfrog designs.