The first thing that caught my eye about Canals of Windcrest was the flying whale! Why flying whales?! Ah, it’s the sequel to well-received Mistwind where flying whales transport cargos of fungi across an island landscape, because… well, why not? Canals is a somewhat smaller game (geographically, that is—the game itself is perhaps a little more complex than its predecessor), with all the action happening within a single city, so whales might not be the most effective way to travel. In fact, the whale taxis follow canal routes and collect passengers from bridges over them, so plain old boats might have made more sense, but where’s the fun in that? Besides, if your manufacturer is already tooled up to produce whale playing pieces, you might as well use them. But enough of all that nit-picking, let’s look at what actually matters.
Canals of Windcrest is designed by Adrian Ademescu and Gordon Oscar, the former also being part of the design team for Mistwind and the latter being artist for both. All of this means if you’re a fan of Mistwind, you’ll surely be interested in the Kickstarter campaign for this new 1–4 player game—though do note that this is the second outing for this game. The initial campaign was cancelled after only a week when it hadn’t reached its funding target: there seems to be a belief that a crowdfunding project won’t be a landslide success unless it achieves its funding goal within just a day, so publisher First Fish Games pulled it, but it’s back for another bite of the cake, with the funding goal is lower this time to make reaching it easier, hmm… Crowdfunding seems full of tricks and trade-offs to be successful and to be seen to be successful, so it’s definitely the case that potential backers ought to pay attention to more than just numbers, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere. But First Fish Games’s call does seem to have worked: the project was funded within hours, and at time of writing, is sitting at twice the target, which coincidentally is within spitting distance of the goal for the original campaign.
In Canals, ‘your goal is to develop your slice of this ever-growing city. With investor backing, you will construct bridges to connect islands, establish production buildings, and manufacture valuable goods for export.’ The islands are separate regions of the city map, each rich in resources you can collect when you visit (unless someone got there first); players can establish buildings (although not completely accurate, I’ll refer to these as factories, just to disambiguate building as an action and building when referring to a tile on the board) on those islands to generate further resources or convert between resource types, i.e., manufacture goods; exporting means transporting those goods to cards at the edge of the map, known as demand tokens; and investors are represented by cards gained during the game which provide a range of benefits.
Gameplay Summary
The game is played on a jigsaw-ish board representing the city of Windcrest—the multi-piece nature of the board does allow it to be configured with more or fewer islands to suit the number of players, but it does feel unnecessarily fiddly. Other shared gameplay components are a market of building tiles, a bag of differently coloured citizen meeples who’ll turn up during the game, a deck of investor tokens, piles of demand tokens at the edges of islands, and resource tokens of various types. Each player has an export ledger, where sold goods are collected (perhaps a better term, since this is a ledger, is recorded) along with multiplier tracks for scoring purposes, and a player board containing workers (known as supervisors), bridges and tracks for the 4 possible actions, as well as a bunch of ‘taxis’ (the whales!) and building tokens. The various markers, meeples and other components for the game are a mixture of plastic pieces, wooden ones and cardboard tokens—a bit of a chaotic mess, but what’s shown on the campaign page is a prototype, so this may change before release.
Canals of Windcrest is played over 4 rounds. At the start of each, resource spaces on islands are refilled and location cards are drafted. Location cards have a coloured icon at the top showing where they can be played (i.e., onto islands with a matching icon) and an indicator displaying resources collected or actions taken when the cards are played. The cards are sleeved, the reason for which will become apparent soon. Players end up with 5 cards each, but will play only 4 of them per round.
Turn structure
This is a fairly complex game, with a lot of possible actions, so I’m going to limit myself to a brief overview here.
Turns consist of 3 steps: play a location card, perform one of the actions shown on the player board, and export goods.
Playing a card means laying down one from your hand and gathering the indicated resources or taking the action shown on the card.
Actions all involve costs which are indicated on the player board. The possible actions are:
· Build action—as mentioned, location cards and islands have coloured icons on the, and you can build only in or adjacent to an area which matches any card you’ve played in the current round. Your options for building are a bridge (more information about these in the supervisor action section), whale taxi (see taxi action for an explanation), or factory. When you place a factory, you slide the associated overlay into the sleeve of the location card matching the area (and this is why those cards are sleeved). These overlays boost the location cards abilities by adding additional resource or action icons, and those increments persist across rounds: cards become stronger as the game progresses. This additionally makes the card drafting phase more interesting because you’re increasing the card’s strength for any player who drafts the card in a future round, not just yourself. You can also activate the factory’s actions at this point (such as converting some collection of resources into others—i.e., ‘manufacturing’ goods for export).
· Supervisor action—you can take a supervisor meeple from your player board and place it on the map; you can also move a supervisor across a bridge to a different location, though if you use someone else’s bridge, they gain a reward. Once a player has completed this movement, they collect all the resources from the final location.
· Taxi action—whale taxis move from station to station on their canals, each station having a graphic indicating what can happen there, e.g., pick up a random passenger pulled from the citizens bag. They can also pick up a supervisor from a bridge as they pass it. If the passenger matches the graphic at the end of the taxi’s journey, the passenger hops off, indirectly triggering an action such as incrementing the export ledger multiplier. (Indirectly, because the action is determined by where the player is on a separate ‘rondel,’ and passengers move the player’s token on that.)
· Manufacture action—pretty straightforward resource conversion, with the manufactured goods being collected on players’ boards, though they’re of limited value until they’re exported.
The export goods action can be played if one of your taxis is adjacent to a demand token and you have the goods it indicates on your player board. You place the resources into your ledger, where they will contribute to scoring and/or provide other benefits.
One final thing to mention is investors: you gain these as a result of actions at various points in the game and can play them for various bonuses, and they also provide yet more scoring opportunities.
At the end of the game, scores are totted up from the export ledger, adding points from buildings and investors. Highest score wins.
Variants
As you might imagine, the initial round is rather slow—you start off with no resources, no taxis, etc. on the map. For those who would prefer to hit the ground (er, water?) running, the rulebook describes a shorter version of the game. At the start, players draw a random location card and place a supervisor there (gaining the location’s resources) as well as a random building; they also take an additional investor—sort of like playing a round ‘for free.’ (This is a little like Terraforming Mars: Prelude, except that you don’t have to buy the expansion to get the effect!)
The rulebook describes an automa-based solo mode as well.
Wrap Up
This is a pretty game (despite the chaotic mix of cardboard, wooden and plastic components) and looks like a nice thinky worker placement game. The campaign page provides a fair amount of information, with links to videos and an draft rulebook as well as several Tabletop Simulator demos. Given that Mistwind was successful and has a strong following (as is the case for other games from the same publisher), this is most likely going to be a well-run campaign.
Some of the campaign add-ons are a bit wacky… If you don’t like the wooden supervisor and export good tokens, you can get digital STL files to 3d-print your own fancy ones, but not the tokens themselves, at least not currently—First Fish Games’ reply to a query on the original campaign was: ‘The campaign would have to go viral for that to happen. We will see how far this campaign can get. It’s a slow start so we can’t tell now.’ (I have to say, personally, wood’s just fine—heck, I’d sooner have simplistic wooden bridges and whales rather than the plastic models, but that’s just me.) Or you can get a whale taxi plushie?! Okay… However, pipping both the STL files and the plushie is the opportunity for up to 5 people to ‘become an investor’—for about £300, you can have your mugshot on an investor card in the game; and at time of writing, 2 of those have been snapped up already. I do struggle to understand the reward structure of some projects, not to mention how people choose to spend their money!
About the author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
