Whence the New Tagline
Posted by Rob Herman at August 4th, 2007
A little while ago I observed (didn’t actually play) a game of Graenaland (Greenland). The promise of Greenland is to be a trading/negotiation game like Settlers, but with extra complications and subtleties. The board is divided up into region in which players can build multiple settlements; settlements give voting rights to the resources in a region.
In practice, players didn’t seem so enthusiastic about the negotiation, which was a practice of last resort, preferring to dominate areas and eliminate the dependency on other players’ goodwill. All of the complications made the game see very inelegant; this wasn’t helped by the rulebook, which was unclear in several places, poorly organized, and lacked helpful diagrams.
Theme-wise, you play Vikings, but you don’t fight. Is this historical? I don’t care! In my book, Vikings fight! Clearly this Greenland is populated by some weird non-confrontational Euro-vikings that would rather settle their differences with voting and diplomacy rather than fighting it out. Too weird.
There was also some debate about how much negotiating was allowed, whether or not you could discuss division of resources, or just make a proposal on your turn. The rules are not at all clear on this.
Yeah. They were _explicit_ about what you’re allowed to negotiate and when, but they didn’t make it clear why, so it didn’t end up making sense.