Orleans: Trade & Intrigue Expansion

If you like Orleans, this provides a good mix of ways to spice up the gameplay. New delivery missions (city names are really small on the board, so it might be hard to find locations if you don't have your reading glasses) add an additional layer to what you can do with goods. Plan your routes accordingly to get even more points. New beneficial deeds mat (where you can send workers) is probably the best addition of this content. Instead of rewards being a coin or two and maybe a citizen if you can finish out the section, there are various rewards that can help your engine or action economy (like get a technology tile, or advance along a water route, etc.) or get even more citizen tokens added to your pile. If you want your dry and beige eurogame to have more take-that options available, you can use the intrigue mat to irritate your opponents. Lastly, there is a new event deck. No longer will you have the guaranteed repeat events to time; there are some very beneficial events and some very painful events that can be drawn. We normally never have to deal with torture (bankruptcy) in our normal games, but there were three instances of torture in our first playthrough with the new events. Fun times all around. I would have given this 5 stars for what the content adds, but our copy seems like the cardboard components might have had a less than good glue application and it feels like the printed material could come off sooner rather than later. It just *feels* off. Could just be me. Or this particular printing. Or maybe it's just this particular box.

The new edition can work well with old edition of base game.