New York 1901 Review

New York, 1901: a harsh time where nary a day would go by when you wouldn’t pass a 10 year old boy with a steel girder in an abandoned downtown lot. But it was a glorious and exciting time too! The multi-coloured patchwork of lots that make up downtown New York are ready to give way to grandiose tetrimino shaped towers and you are set to be at the forefront of this grand movement. Will your plans reach fruition? After all, from tiny girders do mighty skyscrapers grow!

 

 

Players: 2-4

Time: 30-60 mins

Ages: 8+

 

 

I wanna be a part of it…

New York 1901 was a big new release last year from Blue Orange Games, a company that had not been so well known in the hobby sphere before this. Yet they certainly made a splash with this beautiful and brightly coloured package, winning a Mensa Select Award, and going after no less than the family game’s crown most commonly worn by Ticket to Ride and Settlers of Catan. That’s a big aim! But I suppose when you use little Empire States buildings as your score tracker, we shouldn’t expect anything less.

You and your favourite family or other collection of humans can now pursue that loftiest of goals: building something really tall! Each of you has a matching collection of skyscraper tiles that you are looking to build, little more than the gleam in your architect’s eye for now. Before you stretches the completely flat and undeveloped land of Manhattan (existing tenants? What existing tenants!?)

On your turn you’ll pick up a new slice of land, by selecting one of the correspondingly coloured lot cards from the Ticket to Ride style market and stake your claim on the map by sending one of your miniature 10 year olds, girder in hand, to secure it, much as retail moguls do nowadays. Once you have a lot or two you can build on them with one of your tiles. However, that tile needs to fit and lots only come in sizes of two or three… building… units… yes. Yet many buildings come in awkward shapes necessitating control of adjacent lots, inevitably adding tension on your opponent’s turns and especially if you are hoping to grab enough land to build one of the 4 gigantic, Legendary skyscrapers.

But you’re not going to be leaping straight into constructing such magnificent edifices! Goodness! It’s only 1901 and you barely know the first thing about building skyscrapers! No, to begin with you can only build the piddly little bronze level towers. Once you’ve scrabbled together a few points though, your bigger, more valuable silver skyscrapers are unlocked and  a few riveting turns later (because steel girders and rivets…? No?) you’ll unlock the gold technology level, including those auspicious Legendary buildings! Though for those, it’s a race to get the one you want.

I came in like a wrecking ball

The other thing that happens as you climb the technology track is the wrecking ball (blessedly free of Miley Cyrus) is invented. Now you can smash down your old, gnarly skyscrapers, and replace them (and any neighbouring buildings or lots of yours) with more advanced buildings. Taller, shinier, and with more impressive art deco stylings. In fact, stuff goes up and down so fast in the game it all feels quite frenetic, with the skyline bouncing up and down as if part of a dancing Escher sketch (he did lots of those).

Except, of course, it doesn’t. This is a game of flat tiles on a flat board and while the gold level buildings are often larger or more valuable than the ones they replace, this is translated into area rather than physical height. Sure, it sort of represents the shadow they cast, but I do feel like they missed a trick component wise here. Imagine how incredible it would have felt to construct a 3D city! Who knows, there could even have been rules playing off height against square footage. But I digress. Such a game would have been ridiculously expensive even if it were possible to do well.

There are other considerations in the game, like when to play your bonus action cards for more powerful turns and some end game bonuses to worry about: 3 of the major streets will award points to the player with the most skyscrapers touching them, and 1 other card will offer VPs for building in certain ways. But basically, that’s the whole game! It’s very straightforward, which is perfect for a Ticket to Ride competitor, but isn’t quite as elegant to teach as that game (though the way the tech comes out enables teaching as you play, if you know what you’re doing).

New York 1901 is an extremely well put together game. Everything feels tightly balanced and scores will often come down to the wire. Those additional VP cards I mentioned are probably the best part of the game, daring you to build in different ways each game. Maybe you’re trying to build across the joins between coloured regions, or keeping all your bronze buildings out, where normally you’d demolish them early on. They really get you to mix up your gameplay and I wish there were more included. There’s a lot here to like and it really hits the mark on family friendly gameplay.

…but. But. This game feels a lot like Ticket to Ride. The collecting coloured cards to claim regions of a beautifully illustrated board. The spatial puzzle. The trying to carve out your own bits of space while rubbing shoulders with your opponents. And it just doesn’t quite live up to that.

If you go after the king you best not miss

In Ticket to Ride you have this near unlimited possibility space for how to achieve your objectives. You can build a route between Paris and Berlin via Venice and Warsaw if that’s what you need or choose to do. And there’s no such freedom or sense of ownership in New York 1901, ironically for a game about owning skyscrapers. It doesn’t matter where your skyscrapers go up so long as they do. To try and remedy that the game has the area control mechanic over certain streets. But because these are global objectives, applicable to everyone, pursuing them becomes a race to obtain particular lots, and that, particularly in the two player game, is a question of waiting for the right coloured cards to appear. Add that to the fact that there is little in the way of dynamics – skyscrapers not being known for their movement after all – and too much of this area control element is set down in stone from the opening turns. Once you’ve made your choices there’s no going back.

New York 1901 leaves me with a sense of playing its game rather than creating my own. It gives you a range of options: control the streets, level up your buildings, build the legendary towers, maximise that game’s bonus scoring card. All of these are valid options and the winning player will have best balanced the competing pull of all these options, as optimising for one often necessitates passing on others.

But it fails to conjure that feeling of joyful creativity that Ticket to Ride engenders. I don’t care about an individual skyscraper because creating it is often as simple as picking up a card. Whereas the completion of a ticket, or even a route, has pay off because it takes effort and time to collect those cards, effort that might be dashed by an opponent grabbing that route first. New York 1901 certainly has this tightness and players can eagerly get in each other’s way, but it feels less like something you can do anything about. In Ticket to Ride you choose when to stop collecting resources and when to secure areas on the map. In New York 1901 there is only the map. In Ticket to Ride you can push your luck attempting to complete more and more tickets. In New York 1901, you can only ever do the best with what is given to you all from the start.

And there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. New York 1901 is an engaging and enjoyable experience. It’s a puzzle with no right answer and plenty of opportunity for your friends and family to get in each other’s way. Those end game scoring objectives are a real treat and fully maximising those while still playing well on the other scoring opportunities is extremely satisfying. But I’ll never quite get the same sense of ownership and pleasure as I get from growing my colourful line of trains across a map of Europe. It’s a really good, enjoyable game, and if you’re tired of the gateway game staples then this is a great title to pick up next, but it’s not beaten Ticket to Ride for me.

 

Energy Efficiency Rating: A

 

Our copy of New York 1901 was provided for review by Coiledspring games.