We connected up trade routes to our network in La Strada, the next game in our A-Z game shelf play-through.
Basic Info: La Strada
Players: 2-4
Time: 30 Minutes
Designers: Martin Wallace
Artists: Tanja Donner
Publisher: Mayfair Games
La Strada is a road-laying game where players use resources each turn to connect new cities where they can trade. However, the more other players who connect to the same city, the less trade each player can do in that city. Whoever sets up the most valuable combination of trade routes by the end of the game wins.
The game is set up with the board in the center of the table. The board is modular, with one piece that must be played first, and the others rotated and placed around that first one, creating a randomized board each game. The settlement tiles are placed at random on the marked spaces on the board. Then, each player gets the set of workshop tile, roads, cubes and resource marker for their player color (which is shown on their side of the board).
The game starts with the each player placing their workshop on a plains spot (i.e. a spot with a grass background, not forest or hills) in turn order.
Then, each player’s turn consists of taking six resources, marked with their shield marker on the track on their side of the board, and spending as many of them as they would like to lay roads. Roads are built from the player’s workshop or any settlement where they already have a maker, and must connect to a new settlement. Players can place as many roads as they can afford with their resources — two resources for a plains road, three for forest, and four for hills — as long as the newly-placed roads connect to a new city. Each road token is two-sided with a straight road on one side and a turn on the other. Also, each tile corresponds to a specific terrain type. The only other placement rules is that tiles can not be placed on top of each other.
When they connect a new settlement to their network, the player places a cube of their color in that settlement. All players can have a cube in a given settlement (except in the 2-player game, which I’ll mention below).
The game continues until any player discovers they cannot connect to a new settlement at the beginning of their turn. At that point, players move the cubes from the settlements to the appropriate scoring spots in the corners of the board. Each type of settlement is depicted in a different corner with a number of scoring boxes based on how many other player’s markers are in the same settlement. For example, hamlets with just one marker are worth 2 gold for scoring, where those with two markers are worth 3 gold. Hamlets with more than two markers are worth no gold. At the other end of the scoring spectrum, cities are worth five, four, three, or two gold if there are one, two, three, or four markers in them.
Players total up the gold for each of their cubes, and the player with the most gold wins.
This game has been in our collection for a long time. I can’t say exactly when we picked it up, but I believe it was one of the games that we played when we took a community education class called “Beyond Monopoly,” which really got us into hobby gaming. That was back in 2004 or 2005.
As one of our first hobby games, this one has a special place in my heart, but we haven’t gotten it to the table in years, so it was almost like a new game when we played this this time. Unfortunately it’s not a great 2-player game, so our game didn’t evoke any great memories of previous plays.
I do like the decisions about whether to spend all your resources to go after a large city, or hit a bunch of smaller settlements. Or you could even hold off a turn to save some resources to get halfway across the board, but then someone else might snap up the routes you need. And I can see that there would be some great push-pull at higher player counts to decide if you should place a cube in a city, risking that everyone else will go there, or to dash off to a smaller settlement you might be able to have to yourself.
How is it as a 2-player game? It’s okay as a 2-player game, but not my favorite. For the 2-player game, each player has two workshops that they place at the beginning of the game and routes can be built from either one. Each settlement can only hold one cube, though the other player can build through a settlement to connect to another one. This makes the board feel a lot more open, and while there is some competition, it certainly doesn’t have the same level of interaction of a higher player count.
How about the art and component quality? The components are fine — the cardboard board and pieces are decent quality. The settlement marker cubes, though, don’t always quite match the player color (the brown/red player, for example).
Will this stay in my collection? No, at this point I’m ready to let it go. It was a great game that got me into the hobby, but we have moved on in our game tastes and need to make room on our game shelves.