How to Play Great Western Trail

howdy it's Ryan from knots around a table and this is Great Western trail a deck building worker movement game for two to four players and I do rightly vow not to use this phony accent for the entire Vidya now keep your eyes peeled for the rules gremlin who's liable to show up whenever things get weird let me show you how to play you and your friends play cattle Wranglers driving your herds from Texas to Kansas City where you'll ship your cows off by train and cash in on their value along the way you'll face environmental obstacles hire staff use special buildings and construct buildings of your own all in the name of building a better hand of cattle cards by the time you reach the Train throughout the game you'll make several runs up the trail to Kansas City and each time you'll try to finish the trip with the highest value herd possible each time a player ships off their cattle this token gets pushed farther down the board when it gets pushed off the board the end of the game is triggered everyone else gets one more turn and then you count up the points from a variety of sources to see who's won the game uses the word Indians to refer to the indigenous people you meet along the trail obviously that word has issues but I'm going to be using it throughout the video just for clarity's sake I apologize in advance if it upsets you I also tend to call these animals cows even if they're male because the word cow is funny this is your player board there are a number of perks and powers on the board that you can unlock by removing these disks from it to place on train stations and cities each time you reach Kansas City by the way please excuse the state of my blue engine manufacturing error turned it into some sort of futuristic hover train the anatomy of a turn is depicted here in sections a B and C the first is movement the second is actions and the third is we're punishing your hand all players begin the game with an identical deck of low-value cow cards which you shuffle and draw four cards unless you make any changes to your hand between your starting point and Kansas City these are the cows you'll have to ship off by train cashing in however much your hand is worth to figure that out count up these numbers on the cards doubles don't count so this hand is worth three points when your cowpoke arrives in Kansas City you'll cash in your cows for the money they're worth so three points is three dollars these crummy cows don't go away they go into your discard pile and get recycled back into your deck from where you'll probably draw them again later when you deliver your cows you have to remove a disk of your choice from your board and place it on a city but you can only pick a city up to the maximum value of your herd a three value herd puts your disk in either Kansas City or Topeka if you place it in Kansas City you get some extra money but you lose six points if you place in Topeka and then choose Wichita on a later run you get docked three points with the exception of Kansas City on the low end and San Francisco on the high end all of these cities are exclusive each player can only place a single one of their disks in each city what this all means is that if you keep running up the trail with crappy cows you're gonna run out of low value city options and lose buckets of points a major component of this game is deck-building we'll see how you do that later in the video disks with white corners can go anywhere but spaces with black corners will only take disks with black corners the black corner disks uncover more powerful perks that are challenging to unlock the other thing to keep in mind is that the position of your locomotive affects your take when you deliver cows at first glance this looks like a score tracker it isn't the train metaphor actually breaks down a little here and I find the theme somewhat tacked on it's not as intuitive as it should be the position of your train engine has nothing to do with how far you're able to ship your cows that's entirely up to the value of the cows in your hand so if your hand is worth 18 more dollars you can place a disc in San Francisco even if your train is all the way back here however for every little red X you see between your delivery city and the nose of your engine you have to pay an extra dollar to ship your cows so I guess the analogy is that your train only gets your cows so far and then you have to rent time on another company's track to get your cows all the way to San Francisco because you didn't invest in your own infrastructure one final thing worth mentioning is that you can increase the value of your hand by moving this cube to spend purple ribbons each space you move adds a point of value to your hand we'll see how you gain these certificates later on at the end of each turn you draw up to your head limit of four cards later in the game you can spend money to uncover these two spaces which pump your hand limit up by one car at a piece if you need to draw cards but your deck is run dry you shuffle your discard pile to make a new draw deck if you've managed to buy better cows at the market you now have a shot at drawing those cows into your hand on a future turn so I call Great Western trail a worker movement game instead of a worker placement game because like a worker placement game there are a number of action spots where you can place a worker but unlike the majority of those games you only have one worker to place and you're not free to just place it anywhere your single worker stays on the board the whole time and there's a constant forward momentum you have to maintain along the trail always in the direction of these arrows you can never move backwards on your turn you can move up to this many spaces and that number changes depending on player count uncovering these two spaces on your board increases your movement value by one or two points respectively or one point each in a two-player game uncovering these spaces will also earn you points and money something only counts as a space along the trail if there's a tile on it you just completely ignore the gaps so from here to here to here is three movement points and the empty stuff in between doesn't count the game board starts off popularly with a handful of neutral buildings and some random hazards Rock Falls droughts and floods and potentially cows now you mean Indians these tiles are all spaces where your cattleman can stop if you land on or move through a space with a black or green hand you have to pay a certain amount of money listed on your player board which differs by player count later in the game players can construct their own buildings if other players pass through those buildings and they have hands on them the money goes to the building's owners after you've moved forward at least one space and up to your maximum movement points you're free to take actions if you've stopped on one of your own buildings or on one of the neutral gray buildings you can take the actions printed on the building or one of your auxiliary actions which we'll look at in a sec if you land on one of your opponent's buildings or a hazard or an Indian tepee you can only perform one of your auxilary actions and if you land in Kansas City you get to cash in your cows and send them off by train which is its own whole thing there's no limit to the number of cowboys who can park in a single space and Cowboys don't block each other's movement your auxilary actions are listed here on the side of your board most of them are covered up but these two are available from the beginning of the game let's uncover the rest and I'll explain what they do keeping in mind that while I'll explain them from top to bottom you're free to unlock these powers in any order you like take this auxilary action to get a buck from the bank take this action to draw a card from your deck and then discard a card from your hand obviously it doesn't have to be the card you just drew this gives you the hope of drawing higher value cows or maybe discarding doubles since they do nothing to increase your hand value here you pay a dollar to move your engine backwards along the track but you get to move your cube up one space to gain an extra ribbon remember that these certificates can help you bolster the value of your hand when you deliver your cows in Kansas City here you pay one buck to move your engine forward one spin the cool thing about moving your engine is that if other players engines are in the way you just leapfrog them if you're here and you get to move one space forward you move here unfortunately the same principle applies if you have to move your engine backwards finally you can take this auxiliary action to move your engine back one space and then get rid of a card from your hand you don't put it in your discard pile you remove it completely from the game this is how you pare down your deck to weed out your crummy low-value cows like these one-point jerseys yeah you were right said the reason why each of these auxilary spaces has two disks is that certain buildings let you choose an auxilary action and perform it twice we'll see how that works soon so if you stop on one of your own buildings or on a neutral building instead of taking one of your auxilary actions you can take that building's more powerful local actions which the game represents with a green exclamation mark you can perform any or all of the actions on a building which are divided by a vertical line exactly once each and in any order you choose the best way to learn the rest of the game is just to go through these buildings one by one and learn what each one does a few of the buildings have an action that looked like this which means you can cash in a specific cow from your hand for the reward depicted this doesn't mean two cows for two dollars this means you sell one specific cow card in this case a two value Guernsey cow for two dollars you put the cow in your discard pile if you don't have that particular cow in your hand when you stop on this building no cow money for you this icon means you can hire an employee either a rancher a builder or an engineer ranchers help you get high-value cows into your deck builders help you construct your own private buildings Engineers help you move your train engine around you start the game with one of each of these guys hard-coded on your player board the hiring market is here the cost to hire one dude is listed alongside each row this symbol means you can hire an employee without having to pay any money over and above the hiring price on your chosen row if you take this action you have to pay an additional two bucks to hire a guy on top of the price on his row you can't hire anyone in the road that has this token in it you place the worker you've hired in the next available left most spot on your player board if you place a worker on a space with stuff on it you get some sort of perk these perks will be easier to understand once we go through the icons on the buildings on this building you can sell one Dutch belt cow for two bucks you can also take this action to construct a private building somewhere along the Great Western trail you start with a suite of available buildings each with an a side and a B side you decide off the top of the game which side everyone is going to use constructed buildings are worth points to you at the end of the game and some of them have black and green hands on them so they could earn new money from other players if those players have to pass through or stop on them on their way up the trail the cost to construct a building is up here the icon means that you have to have hired at least this many builder guys to construct it but wait you say there's only space for six builders on my player board and some of these buildings cost more than six well that's right you can also upgrade an existing building as long as you have enough workers to make up the difference so if you had this three worker building on the board already and you wanted to build this seven worker building you would need to have four workers on your staff to upgrade it if you upgrade the original building gets knocked out of the game and you can't rebuild it when you build you don't spend workers but this local action says you need to spend two bucks for each worker involved in the construction so this building needs two builders you've got two builders so you have to pay four bucks to construct it unless you're upgrading you can choose any empty space on the board for your building but some spaces are better than others keep in mind that your opponents can choose alternate routes along the trail to avoid your tolls and the game says that if you ever have to pay one of these hand tools and you've got no money you get to keep moving anyway so keep that in mind some spots on the board even give you extra perks for using your building there but they're always in the most dangerous places just past a hazardous area please build responsibly here you can move your train engine forward for as many spaces as you have engineers the other action lets you either gain a purple ribbon or take one of the face-up objective cards everyone starts the game with one of these starting objective cards in effect at the end of the game if you've accomplished all of the things on the card you get the promised points taking an objective card works a little differently the card goes into your discard pile you may eventually draw it into your hand later in the game if the objective card does end up in your hand then on your turn if you choose to you can declare the card you put it out in front of you and take the reward in the top left corner but now you're on the hook to deliver what's on the card if you pull it off you get the points depicted if you don't you lose the points shown here but what happens if you take an objective card and you never get a chance to draw it well at the end of the game you go through your entire personal deck and decide which objective cards to put into play the reason you might want to declare one during gameplay instead of waiting till the game is over is that you get the immediate reward in the top left corner in exchange for taking on the risk of having to live up to it but if you don't declare them during gameplay these cards take up valuable hand space that you need for your cows so you might need to use your auxilary action to discard an objective if you're not ready to commit to it on this building you can take a double auxilary action so instead of one gold you can take two gold as long as you have both spaces uncovered you can't mix and match between the actions it has to be double the effect of one action if you don't have two spaces uncovered you can only do the action once here you can pay two bucks to move your engine forward two spaces or trade with the Indians to trade you remove one of the blue or green teepees of your choice from the board and take the reward listed above the tile for bucks in exchange for a diseased blanket what a deal this building lets you trade a Black Angus cow for two bucks you can also visit the cattle market to buy better Indians I mean cows the available cows are randomly dealt at the start of the game the prices depend on how many ranchers you employ with one rancher at your disposal you can buy any three value cow for 6 bucks or a four value cow for 12 bucks if you have two ranchers the price of a single three value cow drops to 3 bucks or you can split your two Ranchers up and buy a couple of 3 value cows for 6 bucks or buy a 3 cow and a 4 cow for 18 bucks total you're free to distribute your ranchers however you see fit you can use any single Rancher to add two new cows to the cattle market the cows you buy go into your discard pile and hopefully you'll draw them later you don't spend your ranchers after you go shopping they stay on your board and you don't have to use all your Ranchers if you don't want to notice that not all cows are created equal even within their varieties this West Highland is worth 4 points at the end of the game and this one is worth 5 on this building you can discard a pair of identical cows for 4 bucks you can also pay $7 to remove any one of these hazard tiles from the board some of them are worth more points than others and some make the way clear so you can reach your own buildings or avoid having to pay tolls to other players for passing through their property some objective cards award points for collecting these hazards here you can perform a double auxilary action or move your engine forward one space for every engineer you've hired whether you're moving your engine forwards or backwards you can optionally move into one of these turnout spaces if you do you can pay the price at the station to place one of your disks there one disk per player per station just like most of the cities additionally if your first one there you can choose to staff the station by spending one of your worker tiles and trading it for the station tile on the space station tiles usually get you an immediate perk or a persistent ability and some kind of end game scoring bonus get 2 bucks take a hazard tile or trade with Indians or get a permanent purple ribbon that you don't have to spend when you reach Kansas City it just automatically increases your hand value by one on every delivery as for the bonuses one point for every worker you have at the end of the game including the hard-coded ones three VP for every pair of objective cards you've declared whether you've satisfied the requirements or not three VP for each pair of blue and green teepees you have three VP for every two hazard tiles you have of any kind and three VP for every purple ribbon you had at the end of the game whether permanent or temporary if you use a worker to stop the station and you hire a worker again later to fill that spot you get to take that spots bonus again with a bonus on every spot this makes engineers a good choice for staffing stations for the most part the private buildings you can construct use the same iconography as the neutral ones so I don't have to explain them all suffice it to say the private buildings are generally more beneficial than the neutral ones plus only you can use their abilities and the ones with hands on them make your opponents pay you a toll if they stop on or pass through them here are the new icons the player buildings contain if you stop here you get two points for every one of your buildings that is in or that touches a forested area on the board buildings like this one this one and this one let you take the buildings local action and then move up to that many more spaces and take additional actions wherever you stop further up the trail so you can think of these as go again actions this action lets you crack your certificate cube to the max if you've uncovered this space but not this one you can't move your cube past the blocked space this action lets you perform an extraordinary delivery move your engine one or more spaces then you get to place a disk on a city that has a value equal to or less than the number of spaces your engine just moved this allows you to maybe pick up a city that you missed earlier in the game you can ignore the red axes when you're taking this special action any time you place a disk in a city where you've already placed a desk in the sister city you get the reward or suffer the penalty between the Green Arrow's same goes for performing an extraordinary delivery you can even back your engine into a station turnout and claim that station if you don't already have a disk there this building lets you perform the local actions on an adjacent building whether that building is neutral or it belongs to another player adjacent means directly adjacent there can't be any empty spaces between this building and the one you want to copy finally this action lets you upgrade a train station anywhere behind your engine following the usual station rules [Music] when your cowboy reaches Kansas City you perform these steps in this order move through each of these first three spaces and decide which tile top or bottom to add to the board in the case of a teepee or hazard or two this hiring grid in the case of a worker you fill up the rows from whichever space reflects your player count each time you place a tile at the end of the row you push this token down to the next row when the token passes these two milestones you refill the cattle market up to the max cows depending on player count seven ten and thirteen cows for a two three and four player game if you place the tile that pushes the token off the board you keep the token it's worth two points to you but this is your last turn everyone else gets one more turn and the game ends either way when you reach this space everyone at the table has to yell show me your cows this is a necessary and important step and the entire game is forfeit if you do not yell this every single time you reveal your hand tally up the breeding value and optionally spend certificates to sweeten the value of your hand remember that duplicate cows are deadweight and don't add to your hands value take the value of your cows in coins pick a city that is at most as valuable as your hand and place a disk there white corner disks can go anywhere but the black corner disks can only go on black cornered spaces count up the red x's between the nose of your engine and the city you're delivering to and pay that number of coins back to the bank discard your hand refill the four site spaces draw back up to your hand limit and then magically warp your cowboy back to Texas witchcraft now it's time to make another perilous track along the Great Western trail oh there are a few extra bugaboos that the rules gremlin wants to point out if you need to draw a card but you've used this action to thin down your deck to the point where it's smaller than your handle in it you just don't get a card you should have thought of that before committing all that cow murder if you need to place a disk on a white cornered space and you only have black cornered disks left you can use a black cornered disk if you need to place a disk on a city or a station and you don't have any disks left you have to give up one of your disks on a station if your engine reaches space 39 end of the line you can upgrade the station if you wish then you have to move your engine back at least one but as many spaces as you like and collect $3 you can even move into a train station turnout which you can then upgrade if you haven't already even using the three bucks you just earned if you upgrade a building you're standing on you don't get to do its stuff right away and if you remove a tile with a cowboy on it the cowboy hangs out on the empty space for a while my feet are [Music] Great Western trail is a points buffet use your scoring sheets to tally up your take like this you get one point for every five leftover buck azides not off the points on your personal buildings score points for the cities where you have disks in some cases you need to be in both cities a green arrow is pointing to add up your points for any train stations you upgraded tally the points of the hazard tiles you've collected you can also get points for the high value cows you bought at market whether they're in your hand or your deck or your discards look through your hand deck and discards for any objective cards decide which ones you want to put out in play you have to meet the requirements of your plate objective cards or suffer the point penalty for each one an important note is that each element only counts towards one objective card if you have two cards requiring a total of three hazards and you've only collected two hazards you can only satisfy one of these objective cards and the other one loses you points if you've played it in this situation you'd want to try to satisfy this objective card since there's no penalty point for failing to complete this one the station tiles get you endgame points as I explained earlier you get four victory points for every worker sitting in this column or this column on your board if you cleared this disc you get three points if you collected this token you get two points tally it all up using mathemagics to find out who's won in the event of a tie the victory is shared I wish I could quit you [Music] to set up the game shuffle and deal out the station tiles place the neutral buildings on the board matching each one's letter or shuffle them up for a more advanced game flip all the tiles facedown and deal out 7 level 1 tiles these might be hazards or teepees or both deal out the level 2 tiles to fill up 2 rows of the hiring market that will look different depending on your player count here's what it might look like with 4 players of 3 players or 2 players fill up the 4sight spaces with level 1 2 and 3 tiles shuffle the cattle market cards and deal out to 7 10 or 13 for a 2/3 or 4 player game sort them by type to make it easier to shop for cows shuffle the objective deck and deal out 4 cards to the table everyone takes a player board their color and covers up this top space if need be with a tile that reflects the player count then everyone covers all the colored circles with disks put the certificate cube on 0 everyone takes an identical starting deck and their color shuffles it and draws 4 cow cards for their starting hand cons are knit your train engine starts in Kansas City decide on side a or side B and display all your personal buildings face-up in front of you on that side experienced players can even coin toss each building one by one to randomly determine an a side or a B side but the important point is that the chosen side for each numbered building remains consistent for all players 4 of the objective cards have no reward in the top left and no endgame penalty points shuffle those 4 cards and deal one at random to each player put that card face-up in front of you decide on a starting player the rules don't specify how so we can only assume that it's whoever lasts the longest on the mechanical bull take $6 as the starting player and one additional dollar for each player going clockwise on your very first turn you don't have to start in Texas you can place your cattleman on any space on the board and now you're ready to play Indian cows gray western Indians Indian how trail a mean cow trail did you just watch that whole thing oh hey there 100% this video click the badge to subscribe and then click the bell to get notifications when I've got new stuff [Music]

Channel: Nights Around a Table

Views: 23,120

Rating: 4.904335 out of 5

Keywords: western, Clint Eastwood, board game, Rails to the North, instructional, watch it played, board game geek, how to play, tutorial, rules, rulebook, explanation, cattle, wrangling, guernsey, dutch belt, black angus, jersey, Texas longhorn, west highland, brown swiss, holstein, objective cards, trains, enginges, locomotives, country, Kansas City, San Francisco, cowboys, Brokeback Mountain

Id: amPeDoo2Qbw

Length: 28min 42sec (1722 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/longtime_sunshine]

This channel has probably my favorite rules explanation videos out there. His Concordia video is one of my favorites.

[u/cab0777]

He does such a great job with his videos I find myself watching all of them no matter the game. My concern for him is he’s doing older games that have to compete against videos with a ton more views because they’re older and people went to them years ago. Hard to get views when people already know how to play the games.

[u/diseasedmynd]

My wife will refuse to learn board games by video unless its by this guy.

[u/zojbo]

Another nice explanation video from Nights Around a Table.

My one complaint here is that I don't think he did a very good job explaining the X's mechanic. He hit a bit of a snag on it being unthematic and thus counterintuitive (both true), and in the process he didn't get to an important point about this mechanic. That is: can you ever be forced to deliver to a city further back than you want simply because of the effect of X's? The answer to that is no. This is because of two facts:

• you get paid for your hand before you pay for X's
• the payout of a hand always exceeds the number of X's that you could need to pay for with that hand, regardless of where your train is.

In fact this is even true if you want to increase your hand size; the worst case scenario is you deliver to Albuquerque with a $10 hand from position 0, in which case you gain $10, spend $5 on X's, and then spend $5 on hand size.

To me this is an important detail in the explanation, because this is a pretty complicated game with a lot of moving parts, so it is helpful to a new player to not worry too much about this one mechanic. The only danger is that they might think that train advancement isn't very good, but if you sense that they're feeling that way, then you can skip ahead to building train stations/claiming stationmasters, which is really where train advancement shines.

[u/[deleted]]

Love this guy’s videos! Bought the game today bc of it lol

[u/mayowarlord]

I didn't know that the worker on your board counted..... Guess I'm better at GWT than I thought.

[u/lunatic4ever]

the hero we need