I’ve come out against system games before. I think most of the time the system that’s being reused or sequel-ized usually isn’t robust enough to support continuous iteration. 18xx games, while popular and with more franchises than McDonald’s, don’t get better than 1849. COIN—imperialist propaganda pieces with eye-crossingly bad rulesets that don’t stand muster. Quartermaster General doesn’t really improve that much past the original. And don’t get me started on the Spans.

Age of Steam is really the only system that I think stands up to sequel treatment, and half of the maps for it aren’t worth playing more than once. I wish I could say otherwise, but Great Western Trail: El Paso has not convinced me that my sweeping generalizations about system games are incorrect.

Baby’s First Trail

If Great Western Trail: Argentina was Great Western Trail 2.0 and Great Western Trail: New Zealand was the Pillow Fight Edition, Great Western Trail: El Paso is like GWT 0.75? My metaphors are falling apart here.

[caption id="attachment_315459" align="alignnone" width="1024"] ooh big cowboy[/caption]

If you’ve played any of the games of the series before, you’ll recognize most of this stuff. You move around a track, adding various types of assets to your collection, discarding cow cards for money, collecting objectives…

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