Grand Austria Hotel came out in 2017, from designers Virginio Gigli (Egizia, Coimbra, Lorenzo il Magnifico) and Simone Luciani (Tzolk’in, Lorenzo, the Voyages of Marco Polo), both of whom tend towards heavier worker-placement or economic games in their designs. Egizia is an all-time classic for me, and Tzolk’in is one of the best heavy/complex games I’ve played, although the learning curve is pretty steep. Grand Austria Hotel might be their best – it’s heavy, but not excessively so, and the complexity here is enough to present a good intellectual challenge without presenting too much cognitive load, and, most importantly, it’s fun.
Grand Austria Hotel, which I assume is a nod to Wes Anderson’s best live-action movie Grand Budapest Hotel, has you running a Viennese café and hotel, where the main mechanic in the game involves attracting guests to your café and serving them four different dishes (resources), after which you can move them to open rooms in your hotel that you’ve already prepared. You can also hire more staff members who can provide extra benefits – one-time bonuses, recurring bonuses, or end-game bonuses. There’s also an emperor track, which is checked three times over the course of the game, providing a one-time bonus if you meet the threshold, but with a stiff penalty if you fall short. And every game has three ‘politics’ cards, with objectives that provide 15 points to the first player to achieve them, 10 to the second, and 5 to the third.
It is a lot to keep in mind, but the genius of Grand Austria Hotel is how well every element of the game works together. The key is that almost every guest provides some kind of benefit in addition to the points they provide. Each guest requires one to four resources to be moved from your café, which has just three tables, after which you get whatever benefit is on the card – money, resources, moving the emperor track, hiring employees (often at a discount), taking guests from the queue, preparing rooms (often at a discount), or even switching rooms from prepared to occupied.
The game has seven rounds, with players going twice in each round in a snake format, so you know from the start you’ll get 14 turns. At the start of each round, the start player rolls a set of dice and sorts them by value. On every turn, you may take a guest from the queue if you have an open table in your café, with the two rightmost guests free and the others costing one to three dollars to choose. Then the player chooses all dice of any one specific face value and uses the action associated with that number:
- 1: take one brown and/or white resource per die, but not more brown than white
- 2: take one red and/or black resource per die, but not more red than black
- 3: prepare one room per die
- 4: move up one space on the emperor track OR take one dollar per die (in any combination)
- 5: hire one staff member from your hand for a discount of $1 per die
- 6: pay $1 and then use all value-6 dice for any of the five actions above
You can also pay $1 extra when selecting dice to use the action one more time, as if you had an additional die of that value.
Any resources you get from dice can go directly on to your guest cards in your café for free, and you may pay $1 to move three resources from your stash to guests. You can then move any completed guests to prepared, unoccupied rooms in your hotel.
The rooms come in three colors, and may only house guests of their specific color, or guests with green backgrounds, who may go into rooms of any color. When you complete blocks of a color, you get a set reward tied to the color (points, money, or progress on the emperor’s track) and block size. Preparing rooms on the first floor is free, with the preparation cost going up by $1 for each floor on which rooms are located.
There’s still more to it, but the real selling point of Grand Austria Hotel is that all of these elements work together. You need to craft a flexible strategy around guests to acquire, blocks to fill, and employees to hire, without losing sight of the emperor’s track or the objectives on the politics cards. And you will almost certainly be strapped for cash early in the game – you start with $10 but you’ll need it to prepare rooms and buy staffers early on, and may choose to use some of that money to fill some blocks sooner for other benefits.
My one criticism is that Grand Austria Hotel has very little player interaction – it reminds me in many ways of Wingspan, in fact, another game that has a lot under the hood, but also doesn’t involve much player interaction. You could take a guest card someone else wanted, and those politics cards do reward the player to achieve those objectives first, but you can’t do much if anything to stop another player who’s off to the races. It just means that you have to figure out your plan and execute it, while also staying agile in case you don’t get the cards or dice you need. I’ve scored 188 points, which is close to the highest I’ve seen from any player, and I’ve scored 50 points and less, even after I’ve learned the game, usually because I didn’t have enough money. It’s not as good as Wingspan but it’s on par with Egizia, offering a more solitary game but with a comparable level of complexity and harmony from all of the moving parts.