Neuland is an evil game. And, in retribution to its sheer evilness, gamers everywhere have ignored it, even if it's a superb design and a joy to play (even if your tortured brain may not agree).

 

This is by far the most difficult and brainburny game I've ever played. It even scares me a little, and I'm a difficult-game enthusiast: my favorite game is the 18xx series, train games that can last over 6 hours and have so many money transactions that the use of poker chips cuts out over an hour of duration. But this game... this game scares me.

 

Rules are simple. First player to reach a certain number of Vps wins. You earn Vps through the construction and activation of buildings. To build and activate these buildings, you have to navigate through a dense (though pretty clear, actually) technology-tree of products and buildings, slowly and carefully advancing so that other players don't steal away your hard work, or get too free a ride out of it.. On the second turn you're already 100% into the game, calculating different possibilities and different directions to take on the multiple forks-in-the-path the game throws at you.

 

As if walking along a path that divides itself at dozens of different points wasn't enough, the game throws another tough choice at you: you must decide how many actions to take in a turn: if you take few actions, you have a bigger chance to play again (and act upon other players' choices); if you take more actions, you can chain together more decisions. For those of you who have played Tinners' Trail or Thebes, it's exactly the same turn order mechanism, applied to a much heavier game. And that was exactly what I was looking for after playing Thebes and Tinners' Trail: it's a brilliant mechanism, and here it's used to its maximum potential.

 

Even if I love this game to death, I must warn all that there is one huge problem with it, entirely unavoidable and un-fixable: analysis paralysis and downtime. You have A LOT to think about all the time, dozens upon dozens of choices, all with their specific consequences, never forgetting where your opponents are during the game. You will do a lot of thinking, but you will also do a bit of waiting for your turn and complaining about the downtime. For this reason, I suspect that the game is damn-near unplayable with four people. Three is most definitely best, to keep the waiting down and the interaction more dynamic, less head-to-head, zero-sum.

 

Being essentially a logistics game (an extremely complex one at that), it's definitely not for everyone. The theme is bland (even if the art is nice, but more on that later) and the gameplay is quite dry. You will think, think and think when playing this. If there's any table talk, it's definitely between players whose turn it currently isn't: there's no space in your mind for chit-chat as you plan your next steps. The game is that intense.

 

Interaction is definitely high, to a point where explicit conflict breaks out between players, and those last couple of turns can be grueling, if there's only one building left. This is not one of those games where you can play it lightly or heavily: the game's own nature keeps pulling to to the “dark side” of Analysis Paralysis. It came to a point where the chaos-loving player in our group (who loves it when “a lot of crazy random stuff happens”) asked for paper and pencil to plan out his turn. And even he enjoyed this luckless game.

 

 

While it's great that this small-printrun game was picked up by a large publisher, a few terrible missteps got in the way of this game's success, to the point where it was found with huge discounts only a few months after it was republished. First of all, the manual. It's impossible to understand the game from the rulebook. The rules are rather simple, and to a point intuitive (once you get the spirit of it), but the confusing way it is written makes it sound like a terribly obscure design. Thankfully, there are plenty of player aids and rulebook re-writes available online, so this should not stop you from trying this game.

 

Other major flaw is a couple of tragic rule changes that seriously affect gameplay. Why they added luck in mine construction is beyond me: did they really think they could turn this into a more family-oriented game? This monster? It's a horrible change (the other ones are silly, but mostly harmless). Again, you can find guides to revert rules back to what they are in the first edition, which is the only way this game should be played.

 

 

One flaw that cannot be adjusted is the game's graphic design. It looks nice, drawn by the same guy that did Agricola, but it's insufficiently clear when you're first trying to understand the game. The diagonal building-mat is particularly confusing, with arrows only vaguely pointing towards buildings and little differentiation between one row and the next (“is this coming out or going in?”) After the first match or so you get used to it, but this game's learning curve is steep enough (hitting close to 90o) without the colorful mess of the building mat. The board looks nice, though, I should say.

 

So, considering the super-heavy gameplay, the unexciting theme, the incomprehensible rulebook, the lame rule-modifications and the confusing graphic design, it hardly comes at a surprise that this game wasn't a huge hit. It's too bad, this failure encourages game designers to play it safe and keep churning out generic worker placement titles, instead of doing something truly unique and refreshing with their games. I love it. If my brain is up for this exquisite torture, and I have two other maniacs along with me for this 2h30 hour trip of logistic madness, I can hardly think of a better game. I give it a 9/10 because of the production issues (sad) and the downtime (unavoidable), but I imagine this game will bring much more joy beyond the mere three times I managed to get this to the table. I recommend it (for the gamers that are crazy enough). 12+ feels like an optimistic age estimate, here.