Played Arabella tonight. My initial thought was �This was like asking Chat GPT to make an 18xx roll and write, but not the most recent ones, like 3.5 or 4.0, but ChatGPT 1 that was prone to hallucination.� There...
Played Arabella tonight. My initial thought was �This was like asking Chat GPT to make an 18xx roll and write, but not the most recent ones, like 3.5 or 4.0, but ChatGPT 1 that was prone to hallucination.�
There are certainly aspects that sound like 18xx. You build track, buy shares, buy trains (and carriages) run trains, pay dividends, trains �rust� (but not really). BUT even ignoring that this is a roll and write (for a system that mostly appeals because of its minimal luck) there are issues:
Arabella doesn�t capture the cadence of 18xx � Early track builds are free, and then get expensive. So the first few turns are build build build! You can buy stock only when allowed by dice. Once you get a good run, you can use any pair (or three of a kind) to run for good value. So my game was something like build build build, take cash a few times, buy a few shares, buy a train, run, buy a train, run, extend the track and now I had a nice income on my run, so running ~10 times would end the game and simultaneously get me lots of objective cards (which are the primary source of VP) so run whenever a pair showed up.
Trains never rusted � (See this thread for others complaining as well).
Weird stock things � Each company only has four shares � I guess the idea is that the president owns 60% and the other 40% are owned by others, but you can never lose �your company� and can only buy shares in the other players. Except � the president can buy shares back from other players into the company, denying VPs. Um, ok?
There is some snowballing, like in 18xx, but this is a dice game � So when I rolled an early five of a kind (allowing me to take $5 in the early game, when most players had to spend a pair to take $2), I�m not sure that it mooted the rest of the game, but it felt that way.
Frankly, even as a non-18xx game it was kind of boring. As an �18xx� it was borderline insulting. And why does it have cats on the box? Well, it was sold via the internet. I assume that�s why.
Rating � Indifferent, borderline avoid. Avoid
Update � Lowering rating to Avoid, based on the following anecdote.
The first die roll of the game was 1 1 1 4 5 6, [start player] naturally took the three 1s and used the three cubes on the �1� track tile. This let him connect to three towns from then on he could easily just take any single die on his turn and collect 4 income, while [the other players] could not get nearly that much barring a lucky die roll � and could not even build on our first turn because he had flipped the tile, so now builds were not free.
Yeah, this seems like the sort of thing that a non-ChatGPT game designer should have noticed. �Hey, the first die roll can decide the game.�
