Pyramid Review
Canal Mania: The Golden Age of English Canal Building
Published by Ragnar Brothers
Designed by Steve Kendall and Phil Kendall
Illustrated by Collin Jones and studio@d-blue
Full-color boxed set with board, 170 cards, 120 tiles, 15 barge pieces, 20 wooden goods cubes, and 14-page rulebook; $50
Canal Mania, 2nd Edition is an English route-claiming and route-building pre-train game that takes place during England's 18th-century Industrial Revolution and ends with the coming of the railways in 1829. Designed for two to five players, a game can be played in 90 minutes, but two hours is more likely. Combining the look and feel of a Euro game with a strong historical theme, Canal Mania abstracts what might be more complex in similar games -- the transportation of goods. Although low on direct interaction, a player has plenty of choice during his turn and will be kept busy throughout the game.
Inside Canal Mania's solid box is a fully mounted board depicting England from Lancaster in the north to Arundel in the south and divided into half-inch hexes. Rough terrain is indicated with brown, while major cities and towns are divided into six colors. One city or town of each color is marked in two shades to indicate its historical significance, such as London or Manchester; this shading is important when placing Goods tokens. A river-shaped scoring track runs around the board's edge, while the corner Canal Basin is used to store the little brown wooden Goods cubes. Each player has a . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: January 11, 2008
Copyright © 2008 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.