TransAtlantic
A game that was released just last year is nice to get a game of, and I quite enjoyed it, even though there was a bit more thinking than I anticipated in this game about shipping in the early steam age.
Everyone starts out with a sailing vessel in a separate sea, as well as the communal boat in the prestige North Atlantic region, and before you really start everyone in turn order gets to buy a steam ship and add it to the next zone over from where their sail boat is. With the new ship market updating between each purchase, including one ship from it going to the docks, there was quite a big change to the market during just the setup with 5 players purchasing 1 ship and getting rid of another one.
For the actual game play, on your turn you play a card from your hand that lets you do certain actions that range from resupplying your ships with coal, purchasing new ships, shipping cargo (generating income), collecting various tokens to make different types of ships more valuable (and score more points at the end) to picking up your used cards and playing a new card from the market (which adds it to your supply for the rest of the game). This is a mechanic I came across in Concordia, but with it's own little twist on it where you don't 'buy' cards, but it's part of the 'return all cards to the hand' turn, so if you recycle your deck more often, you get more market cards than if you play all your deck before doing the recycle action. Given that there isn't much of a downside to the recycle action in this game, it more depends if there are good options in the market for you or not more than in other games I've seen where the recycle turn is a bit of a stagnant turn where all your doing is picking up your cards.
Late in the game all the oceans get filled up with ships
With so many options on your turn it can be a bit tough to work out what to do, but if you lack the money for any of the ships on the market, you can't purchase ships, and if you don't have any coal it's probably not useful to deliver cargo, so the resources that you have on hand do help reduce the options of what you play a bit. It doesn't mean that there is only one strategy that you can play, or even just the one option that is successful, but more once you've embarked on a specific direction, you lock yourself in for a few turns as the other decisions you could make become less useful or even impossible. I found this quite good, as it meant you could plan a few turns and then watch what others were doing while you were mostly not needing to. There was still some player interaction which could change the plans, such as if someone else made one of your ships deliver goods, it would give you money when you weren't expecting it, meaning you could spend instead of having to deliver goods yourself. Though it may also have meant you now needed to get coal instead of shipping since you're out now and it's never nice when your ship could have delivered but didn't due to a lack of coal.
It was such a fun game, and I look forward to playing it again at some point, though probably not as a second decision making game of a night (this was played directly after Santa Maria, which I'll write about in the future)
If this sort of recycling hand/deck mechanic is something you enjoy, I'd certainly suggest you give TransAtlantic a go. More so if you like the age of steam, as the artwork on the ship cards is quite nice and as far as I could tell, all the vessels were period accurate (with some artistic license of the stats for game balance)
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