HIGH SEASON: GRAND HOTEL ROLL & WRITE
Oh, Vienna
Designer: Ryan Hendrickson, Simone Luciani, Virginio Gigli | Publisher: Lookout Games
There are certain hotels that people return to, time and time again. Rather than broadening their travel horizons, they are perfectly content on repeating identikit holidays year in, year out. Board games are the same. And in the Cox household, Grand Austria Hotel offers such a 5-star experience that it’s revisited on a regular basis.
The prospect of High Season, a roll and write spin-off, is therefore very enticing. Yet whilst I’d pictured a riff on the original set in a previously unseen part of the hotel (or adopting a different role to guest management… or launching a sister site in Salzburg) we are merely offered a mini-break version of the original. You’re doing the same as before – picking up dice to open and occupy guest rooms, while fulfilling the emperor’s every whim – just in hurried time and with a wipeclean board and pen. Surely no guest wants to feel rushed out the door?
Ah. Guests. Where is the upper-crust crowd that can’t possibly sleep without a strudel and vino? Lookout Games have checked them all out in order to condense down the game. With the restaurant element also therefore removed, there is no longer the need to wine and dine guests before getting them into bed. Removing these eccentrics, from the Flamenco Dancer to the Professor Emeritus, literally robs High Season of character.
The player boards have also been subject to some questionable housekeeping. An amalgamation of several boards found in the original, they’re busier than a busload of tourists outside The Savoy. This makes everything an effort as information competes for your attention, while the hotel becomes an afterthought, squashed up and shoved to one side. The board design proves most problematic on the Emperor fulfilment track, which rather than being linear (as in the original), is now confusingly broken into three separate lines.
Trying to please the Emperor becomes frustratingly restrictive under the reduced time frame and it often feels this is more a game about appeasing authority than running a hotel. A couple of rule tweaks do manage to accommodate the ticking clock. A new ability to take loans is a tidy solution to the fact there’s less chance to raise funds. Bonus points for the first person to complete rows and columns is an enjoyably competitive touch. Only being allowed to occupy one room at a time, however, is painful. Who wants a quarter-full hotel to show for their efforts?
It’s worth pointing out not everyone at the playtest table will be moaning on Tripadvisor – one quite liked it, acknowledging fairly that the game’s mechanics are largely (bed)bug-free. Said person was equally unfussed that this is a lite version of an immersive original, and also took no issue with one of my pet hates: this is a roll and write without any creativity. The pen serves to uninspiringly circle or strike through doorknobs to show their open or occupied status, which is hardly thrilling stuff. A core element of the game is that rooms are either yellow, red or blue – it would have been so much more fun to have been colouring them in some way. Call it childish, but it should be one of the perks of this genre.
On reflection, it’s likely an advantage to have never played Grand Austria Hotel. As a watered-down roll and write, High Season is a missed opportunity to expand the Grand Austria universe, to do something boutique that stands alone. In the original, you are supposedly turning a hostel into a luxurious hotel. But with the guests missing, cramped boards and lack of imaginative flair, High Season often feels like you are working in the reverse.
❚ PLAY IT? MAYBE Grand Austria Hotel newcomers will likely have the most enjoyable stay.