Takahe’s Solo Den: Tinners’ Trail
How’s the reprint of this mining themed euro classic from a solo perspective?
I love when my board game comes with a beautifully presented map as the main board. Could be because it is something I do professionally, but still, having a gorgeous piece of cartography as a main playing area for your board game makes me want to play it a lot more, even if the mechanisms are not something to write home about. I am not saying that is the case of Tinners’ Trail – in fact, the core gameplay loop in this one is as good as you can get in euros – however, seeing the map immediately made me biased in favour of this game. So how is this beautifully upgraded reprint of Martin Wallace’s older game holding up today, especially from solo perspective?
Tinners’ Trail is an economic action selection euro mixed with auctioning and very light area control. All the mechanisms are cleverly grounded in a well executed, historically grounded theme about 19th century Cornwall’s mining industry. Even the randomness in this game is thematically explained which really adds to the overall historical authenticity of Tinners’ Trail. It’s clear to me that, similarly to what Uwe Rosenberg is doing with his farming euros, the designer and his team did their research around the topic before they implemented a game around it, which is always a massive plus in my eyes.
Back to the game itself, standing somewhere on the mid-weight side on the complexity scale, Tinners’ Trail is deceptively easy to learn and get into. Your main goal is simple; auction and buy land, build mines, hire additional working force, drain water (which hinders your mining operation), mine tin and copper… and then sell all the extracted ore for big profits. The price of tin and ore is the randomness factor mentioned in earlier as you set those at the beginning of each round (4 rounds in total). The reasoning behind this randomness is logical; more mines -> more ore -> more supply on the market -> price of the ore falls down… have I mentioned this game has a rock solid historical background?
So, the basic gameplay loop pretty much follows the same formula throughout the whole game. However, the crunchiness comes from how you chain your decisions and what you do with the time you have. See, time is the key currency for executing actions in this game. You have more or less 9 actions upon which you can spend your 9 units of time (less if you toy with arsenic in arsenic expansion), and these actions vary in terms of how long they take to execute. Auctioning land takes two units, building drainage tunnels costs even more… but draining water out of mine shafts using steam pumps, hiring miners, or bringing in ships to help takes only one unit of time.
You might be thinking, “why would I want to use those tunnels if they take so long to build?” Because those tunnels drain water on two neighbouring lands AND add 2 additional ore cubes to each one of them. You really want to get rid of water as often as possible because it hinders your mining operations and, when extracting ore from water filled mine, you must pay an additional cost for each water cube in your mine. You might be also asking, “why do you need miners and additional workforce (ships/trains)?” Because your mine can only extract 2 cubes of ore and after the mining is done, you have to add in a water cube, making the next mining operation on that land more expansive.
Another thing to consider is the market price for ore which changes at the beginning of each round, maybe you risk it and wait until next round to see if the price goes up… or you mine the ore now and not worry about the future rounds? You also have to bear in mind though that with each subsequent round, you score less victory points for the same amount of money (you “buy” those vps for money from selling your ore). So, as you can see, there are a lot of hard decisions to be made in this game.
Speaking from the solo perspective, the new edition of Tinners’ Trail introduces a solo variant which pits you against solo bot called Lord Wallace. Lord Wallace is a wealthy gentleman and therefore doesn’t need to pay for auctions, he only keeps track of how much his mining operations cost and deducts it from his end of round profit. Other than that, the bot still has to pay for actions using time units and executes actions as described on the solo card drawn for him. What I really like about this solo variant is how (mostly) logically it behaves. In the first two rounds he spends a lot of time buying land, adding miners and workforce, and getting rid of water. The latter two rounds are mostly dedicated to extracting all the ore he has in his mines. If the price of copper is high enough, he will prioritise mining of that particular ore. If not, he mines whatever.
Another clever thing about solo is how it handles the auctioning. In a game against the human opponent, the auctioning and bidding works as you would expect – but against an automated bot, the bidding had to be designed in such way that it would be a) logical (the bot will bid more for lucrative land) and b) still had an element of uncertainty. I am happy to say that the solution implemented in this game leaves no room for ambiguity and delivers the excitement of bidding even for the solo players – you know that the bot will do XYZ if XYZ criteria is met (say for example the bot will go for land with the highest value, coastal and to the east) and you will also have that element of the unknown when the bot rolls the dice to calculate his total bid. I really must applaud the designer for coming up with this solution, sure it lacks the unpredictability of human opponents who might bid ridiculously high for crap land… but as far as I can tell, it is as close as it can get to mimicking the real thing.
Tinners’ Trail is a game I fell in love with the moment I did my first read of the rulebook. The art and the components are simply stunning to look at and play with, the rules are well written and easy to digest, the gameplay mechanisms are beautifully streamlined to deliver the theme… it’s really hard to fault anything on this relatively humble gem of a game. In terms of the solo experience, Lord Wallace is a fantastic opponent that behaves quite rationally, plus the game comes with plenty of difficulty modifiers (with neat explanations as to why Lord Wallace gets such additional benefits) and two solo-friendly mini-expansions, both of which can further enhance your game. Yeah, Tinners’ Trail is a surprising hit of 2022 for me and if you like light-to-medium euros, particularly ones with a refreshing take on the genre, you should definitely check this game out.
