Arkwright: Anniversary – $159 taxes incluses (réservez votre copie !)

1-4 players:

Arkwright est un jeu de société économique conçu par Stefan Risthaus, où les joueurs incarnent des entrepreneurs dans l’Angleterre du XVIIIe siècle, construisant et gérant des usines. Dans cette nouvelle édition anniversaire, le jeu a été simplifié et mis à jour avec un nouveau livret de règles et de nouvelles illustrations. Le jeu offre différentes expériences de jeu grâce à différents modules, dont les variantes « Spinning Mule » et « Waterframe », ainsi qu’un module « East India ». Il propose également un mode solo, appelé « Automat », qui permet à un joueur seul d’affronter des adversaires artificiels.

1. East India Company Board (Module)
The board shows one influence track for each of the four goods and corresponding upgrade resources (sugar for bread etc.) In each track you may advance by spending money. It becomes more expensive during the game so you want to spend the money early – on the other hand the early game is when you most urgently need every pound. When advancing on the tracks you pass bonus spaces for additional marketing or multiplier for game end scoring.
In game end scoring you calculate the value of your shares as usual. Then you add the East India Company influence from the four tracks. Each track gives you additional scores depending on the multiplier you have passed on that track and the final value of the corresponding resource. Example: Sugar has a final price of 5p and you passed the multiplier « x3 » on the track, you score 15p on top of your share value.

2. Asymmetrical Factories (Module)
You may decide to build a mass production or luxury good factory instead of a regular quality factory. The number of workers and machines are identical, but the costs/basic quality and output changes:
Mass production = low costs and quality, but high production volume
Luxury goods = high costs and quality, but low output (for example you produce only, if both of the first two production lines are completed)

3. Automa Cards
You may add Automa players to your game round. You may play solo with up to three virtual opponents or add Automa players to fill up the table up to a total of four players. There are 4 different Automa players, one per color.
The mechanism is rather simple, because per cycle there is only one card that says, what the Automa players will do. There is only adjustment of the appeal of their goods and paying some money to them (with a money token on the share value track, no need for handling with respect to cash etc.). You do not need to do all the handling for production strips, price markers etc.
Each Automa follows a specific strategy, but for variety there are 6 cards per decade, while only 4 are in use.

4. Spinning Mule (Variant)
We dropped the Spinning Jenny variant (remember: no shipping, no development tiles, no economy tiles, no events).
The new Spinning Mule variant includes everything that makes Arkwright the game for experts. The main differences to the full Waterframe version is that you play only 3 decades (instead of 5) and you can use ships without preparing contracts before. But it includes all the features of the main game.
It plays in less than 120 minutes.

5. Minor changes
We did a hundred of small changes like allowing lower minimum prices for bread (2p), cloth (3p), silverware (4p) instead of a same minimum price for all goods. That gives you more flexibility in the competition.
Charisma development is split up in two tiles: determining the start player and breaking ties.
More ship tokens, a contract limit marker to allow you to stop increasing your contracts beyond your ship capacity.
Streamline of event effects. Events in play are shown to the players before the game before shuffling and displaying them facedown. So you now, what might happen, but you do not know, when it will happen.