Roads & Boats is a splotter game, their original big hit. It's difficult to find currently but I was lucky enough to land a copy. The game is all about logistics and civ building with logistics as the primary function. The map is created by hexes of varios terrain (pastures, mountains, stone, forests, sea, deserts) and you start with several donkeys and geese, and some planks. From there you have to transport the goods around the map and build production buildings around the map to produce goods, then refine these goods, and finally refine them further into goods that score points (coins, stock, and Gold are the only goods that score). You can build factories to produce better transporters including rafts, steamboats, trucks, wagons, airplanes and trains. You also create roads for the transporters to move things around. The more advanced the transporters the farther they can travel and the more they can carry.
As all splotter games in my experience the game is simple to learn with limited rules, but incredibly hard to master. The rulebook is only 15 pages long, yet I found myself unsure how to even accomplish my goals.
The first scenario was called "Lord of the Ring". I started out pretty good I thought before long I was cutting wood, refining it into planks, quarrying stone, and I even built a mine and was preparing to build rafts to cross the see as quick as possible. I had to build a ring of roads around the map to tray and get goods moved around quicker (donkeys can more without roads, but only 1 space per turn while with roads they can move 2).
My small civilization growing with a donkey down south preparing to produce a raft while two donkleys up north headup into the mountains to build a mine for gold production.
But then I didn't stay organized. Even though I had rafts built and could have easily focused on transporting goods via water I decided to also build a wagon factory to increase my land transport. The game was too short to be spread out. I should have upgraded my rafts instead to rowboats or even steam ships. I managed to build a paper mill and get some gold out of my mine for a final score of 90 points, but that is pretty lackluster since the high score reported by splotter is 360 points... yeah I wasn't even close.
My final civilization. Not terribly impressive...
I loved the challenge though and set it up again with a new scenario, "River runs through it".
This time I quickly spent two turns to mate my donkeys from 3 to 5. Then I decided since this new map was so small I would focus on getting stock created for major points (each stock certificate is worth 120 points on their own) and just use my army of donkeys to deliver the goods. It takes some real work to get to stocks. You have to have paper, fuel, gold, and mint coins and then transport the coins and paper to the stock market. I managed to mint coins, and build the stock market and my donkeys were transporting the coins to the stock market and I needed one more turn to get the coins to the stock market and I just barely missed it. In the end I scored 160 points, so a big improvement and over my previous score and just barely short of another 40 points hitting 200. That just kept my short of the 260 suggested score and 300 high score. So not too shabby for a second game.
The end product of my civilization, completely on the back of a donkey army this time. I called this one a success.
Overall I really enjoy this game. I think it is really going to have legs in my collection. Splotter keeps hitting the spot for me.
