Grand Austria Hotel is in my top 5 games. Despite having only a passing interest in hotels per se, this game is one that I’m always happy to bring to the table. It’s so well-tuned. You always feel you needed one more turn for the perfect finish. Working out your priorities from hiring staff, fulfilling orders quickly and preparing rooms for guests feels very much like the juggling of tasks a real-life hotel manager might need to do. It just flows. So I bought the expansion, which is a huge bargain because it has 5 expansions in one box (one is quite mini), plus solo mode.
The solo mode is named ‘Dinner for One’. It’s compatible with four of the expansions (the mini expansion is a way of varying turn order so that doesn’t apply if you are the only player).
I don’t propose to talk you through the rules for the base game – if you’ve bought the expansion, you already know how to play it. I have found that solo modes for games work best when they don’t vary too much from the multi-player rules and as far as playing the base game solo is concerned, Dinner for One does that very well. I assume the same can be said for the expansions too but I haven’t tried them solo yet.
How it works
The only extra components you need are twenty cards comprising the Leopold instruction deck, then just set up for a two-player game with the following changes:
Leopold always uses the night-time side of the board, He has no use for money, food or drink. He does hire staff so to facilitate this you deal him 5 end-of-game scoring cards face down and shuffle the others into the deck as usual. Instead of dealing yourself six staff cards at the start, you deal ten and choose which six you want to keep in your hand. Return the others to the bottom of the staff deck. Leopold does not select a guest at the start of the game and doesn’t need to prepare rooms because he will always send guests straight to their rooms, placing an occupied token on them. He needs no space for guests in his café, which does help a bit with space.
You can play three levels of difficulty against Leopold. I decided that although I know the base game like the back of my hand, I would start on the easy level. Just as well, as it turns out.
During Grand Austria Hotel, your own turns are exactly the same as usual, although you may learn, as I did, that you need to think differently about strategy because of how Leopold plays. On his turn, you draw a card from the instruction deck and carry out the listed effects from top to bottom. To differentiate between levels, the illustrations have different borders – no border, silver border or gold border. Depending on which level you are playing, you ignore some or none of the effects. I was concerned that the different borders would be difficult to tell apart, but in the end, I didn’t find it a problem, they are quite clear. I did struggle with the little hand symbol at the bottom of the card. It tells you whether to prioritise guests or dice from the left or right. For example, if Leopold is to take a die from the number with the most dice and there is a tie, the hand symbol tells you whether to take the right or leftmost die. If the hand points right, you take the left die and vice versa. I find this system a bit confusing and would have preferred a different symbol to denote this.
On Leopold’s turn, he will always take one or more guests, then a die, then perform one or two additional actions. These might be gaining emperor points, working towards objectives or gaining staff cards from his personal supply. He puts guests straight into rooms from left to right if yellow, blue or red, and from right to left if green. I found Leopold’s turns easy to get the hang of and because he doesn’t apply card effects or get bonuses for groups of rooms his turns don’t become as complex as your own can.
So how did I get on? In the first game I did check the rules a few times but not often enough to be annoying. The symbols denoting Leopold’s actions are easy to understand. He beat me 84 – 82. I’m not going to spoil your own journey of discovery but in the second game I changed my strategy and although my own score only increased by two, I managed to make things more difficult for him and bag a win. If I’m playing a real person I almost never deliberately choose an action just to mess up their plans but against a fictional opponent I’m happy to be more ruthless!
To summarize, like all the versions of Grand Austria Hotel I have played so far, I found this one enjoyable. There wasn’t too much more to get your head around (I have enough trouble keeping track of my own turns). I’ve only tried it with the base game so far, and there is a whole separate stack of cards to use for modules one and two, so if you are a keen solo player, Dinner for One has a lot to offer.
PS I have now played against Leopold on easy level 4 times and only won once! Clearly I have a lot to learn about how I play this game.
