Great Western Trail (2nd Edition) | Board Game | Ages 12+ | 1-4 Players | 75-150 Minutes Playing Time, Multicolor,PBGESG50160

This is a really superb euro game and plays well with two three or four players, top quality components and the board and artwork is fabulous, it takes a while to set it up for play but is well worth it. Lots of choices in how you play it and it takes a game or two just to get to grips with the various options and rules. It's one of the top rated games in BGG and I can see exactly why, I picked it up for a great price on Amazon on a black Friday deal and am delighted with the purchase. If you like Euro games like Scythe, Castles of Burgundy, Viticulture, Wingspan, Brass Birmingham, Dune etc this is a great medium weight addition. It's not too long in 2 player mode but about 2+ hours in 3 or 4 players. Nice to see a game with an insert for the cards etc as well.

Great game and the quality of the board and playing pieces are fantastic. Great addition to our Boardgame collection.

Takes a long time to set up the first time and a chunky rule book, and the first game takes a long time to run through, but the game play speeds up with each turn you take as you learn all the actions. Is a really good game I’d highly recommend

Parts missing

Lovely game. Really enjoy it.

This is a great mid-heavy weight game that's well worth the time investment.The learning curve is steep initially, first game we had to double check the rules often, by game 5 we'd ironed out all the little mistakes we'd made on some of the rules. And once you've got the rules it's fairly easy to play.There are so much variety and so many options available though, the point being you can't do everything, but it's fun developing strategies to help maximise victory points at the end.Will you go primarily for Cowboys or Engineers, or maybe even Builders? Which Houses will help that strategy? Which Objective Cards will you add to your hand etc.The board, components and Cowboy Meeples are well designed and look good.One downside is it's a bit of a table hog. Our Dining room table is approx 120cm X 80cm. This fits the Board, extras and two player boards, but not enough space if we wanted to 3 or 4 player game.You can expand the game if you want more by adding the 'Rails to the North (2nd edition)' expansion, which is meant to be really good. For now the base game contains enough variety and strategy for me.Have really enjoyed the game as a 2 player many times and a 3 player game once which is possibly slightly better, but either way it's a great game.

Great game, badly damaged box

This is version 2 of Great Western Trail, released in 2021. It makes some changes, a few of which affect gameplay, most are merely artistic. It does not include the expansion Rails to the North, which will presumably be on sale in a year or two. And if you have the expansion from version 1 it won’t work with the version 2 base set because the boards don’t match up.1. Gameplay changes. These are minimal: the tokens you can pick up that allow you to draw and then discard a card are included in the base set, whereas if you have version 1 they are only available if you have the expansion. And there is an additional breed of cows that go up in value after being delivered. And that is pretty much it. So almost identical gameplay to version 1. Which means the reviews for version 1 all are good for this one as well. If you like/dislike version 1, you will feel the same about version 2.2. Art. This has been changed. When version 1 came out, some high-profile reviewers found the box art ugly and said you had to get past this to enjoy the game within. I personally didn’t think it was bad, and the word of mouth recommendations were off the scale, so changing the art seems like a bit of a vanity project rather than a necessity. Now, instead of the gritty monochrome sepia faces staring at you from the original you get a 1950s style Western landscape with cowboys. A nice enough picture, but for me perhaps a bit too generic, i.e. just like every other western cliche image from the last 50 years, whereas version 1 was more distinctive, maybe. Inside, the game board, cards and tokens are re-worked, and there is a hint of concern with the redesign about causing offence to ethnic minorities. Historically the board game industry has been tone deaf when it comes to such matters, one of the most consistently highly rated board games of recent times is an abstract simulation of plantation management where the players literally do take brown people off a boat, put them to work in the fields, then send the harvested crops back. When observers have tried to point out how bad this is, much of the games community has been vigorous and sometimes angry in defence of their beloved game and can’t see anything wrong with it. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the world of board gaming is still very white, and as a white person who wants to be comfortable in the company of people from all ethnicities I now don’t like to play that game in public. So back to Great Western Trail, and yes, version I did have trading with the Indians as a mechanic, tokens with wigwams on, that must have seemed ok before BLM, and not so bad now, but perhaps they wanted to future-proof the game against such criticism. I suppose we should be grateful that the board game industry is at least now moving in the right direction. My only criticism of the new art is that it makes the iconography less clear than the original. A new player would find it a bit harder to understand; this was always a major part of the learning curve in GWT, so changing it for the worse is a backwards step imho.So, should you buy GWT version 2, or version 1? Answer: yes. Either. GWT is one of the best games of recent years, and version 2 is almost the same. If I was buying now and didn’t already have v.1, I’d buy v.2. The only reason I might buy v.1 now is if I wanted to play it with Rails to the North now and couldn’t wait.