Glen More

Highlands. Clan lands. Isolated villages between mountains and lakes. Castles and abbeys. Stone and wood. Pure wool and cattle. Cereals, distilleries and whiskey barrels. This is the Scotland of the late 17th century, where Glen Mor is located, the Gaelic for Great Valley, home to the lake Ness, yes the one and only, Loch Ness, as well as Loch Oich and Loch Lochy.

To set-up the right ambiance you better find a kilt, read the rules with Scottish accent, add a lit fireplace and taste a good malt from the Inverness region, such as Glenmorangie, which sounds very appropriate.

Set up for three players

At first your territory is just your village, with a single clan member and a handful of coins. No wood, stone, grain, cows or sheep. You will need to do everything!

In each game turn, you can seek to expand your territory, activate terrain tiles to produce resources, buy and sell on the market, and even promote members of the clan to chieftains.

Each territory tile has specific characteristics. From quarries you obtain stone, of course; for sheep, you will need meadows; pasture, for cattle; forests, for wood; cereal fields, for grain. And there are also fairs, grocery stores, slaughterhouses, bridges and taverns.

And finally, there are special tiles, some with immediate effect, triggered when they are placed, as Loch Oich, that allows you to activate all your tiles at once, or only at the end of the game, as Iona Abbey, scoring points for certain types of tiles.

The goal is to get victory points, which are associated with barrels of whiskey, chieftains and caps, or special cards.

Expanding the village

All this variety allows for very different strategies. But things are only starting to get interesting.

Firstly, you don’t take turns always along the same order! The player in turn is the one at the rear of the chain on the central board, where new tiles are picked.  In the example above, regarding the set up for three players, it is now the turn for the blue player. And here begin the dilemmas: advance further to reach a strategic card, running the risk of not playing for multiple turns until, yet again, be the last in order, or take a smaller step and run the risk of another player taking the wanted piece?

Then, because many of the tiles have associated costs and you must have the right resources, at the right time.

Finally, because there are three scoring rounds throughout the game, a feature which will challenge short term options, regularity fans or those pursuing victory down to the wire.

At the market

The matches with two or three players were not forgotten, by introducing an extra "ghost player”, the dice, which will randomly remove some of the tiles waiting to be picked, and thus elegantly maintaining the typical uncertainty of the games with a larger number of participants.

Overall, a great game in a small box, where at the end everything fits well and tidy.

Back into the box

Cramer, Matthias. Glen More. Ravensburg: Ravensburger Spielverlag, 2010. Alea, Bernau.