Grand Austria Hotel

29th October 2019

Tuesday night gaming at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking with the board game club continues.

The final game of the night was 'Grand Austria Hotel'.

It doesn't take much imagination to realise that this is a game about running a hotel. That's right, keep those restaurant customers happy. Manage all those hotel rooms. Maintain the prestige of your establishment. All the fun!
Joking aside, Grand Austria is pretty good game. The rules are fairly straightforward to learn, but there's a lot of things to think about and take into consideration. A lot of things! 

What's in a game?
Grand Austria Hotel has a lot of components. They are all quite colourful and well made.

• Game board: The main game board has a few things going on. A scoring track, a prestige scoring track and a turn track. Space for 3 objective cards, space for 3 prestige reward/penalty tokens and finally 5 spaces for guest cards.
• Action board: The action board determines how many of the 6 the game's actions will be available in any particular given turn.
• Dice: These are normal six-sided dice to go with the action board.
• Personal hotel board: A hotel board is given to each player. The board displays a money track, 3 spots to place guest cards in your restaurant and a place for food and drink. There are also 20 hotel rooms that come in 3 different colours, blue, red and yellow. These hotel rooms are also grouped into sets of 1 to 4 rooms. These boards are double sided, one side is identical for all players, the other is different for all players.
• Room tiles: Used to indicate if rooms in a hotel are; not ready, prepared or occupied. There are the same 3 different colours as the hotel rooms
• Staff cards: Staff cards that can be bought by players. They give a benefit or advantage, staff cards can be a one-off, once per turn or always active. Some staff cards provide bonus points during the endgame instead.
• Guest cards: Guest cards are acquired by players. They have a need. If the player fulfils that need, then the player is given a reward. Then the guest will go into a prepared room that matches the guest card's colour. Guest cards come in 4 colours, blue, red, yellow and green (Green is a wild colour.).
• Turn order tokens: Actually very important in this game.
• Little wooden cubes. Yep, it's a quality game if it has little wooden cubes! They come in 4 colours to represent the food and drink needs of guests in restaurants. Brown is for strudel, white is for cake. Red is wine and black is coffee.

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Hotel board at the game start. Note how hotel rooms are grouped by colour.

The action board before any dice have been rolled.

The main game board before anything has been added.

Main game board with objective cards, prestige tokens and guest cards.

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How's it play?
We begin with setup.

• Give out the hotel boards. ​Players decide on whether they want identical of unique hotels and use the relevant side.
• Shuffle and place 3 objective tokens on their relevant spaces on the board.
• Shuffle and place 3 prestige reward/penalty tokens on their relevant spaces.
• Shuffle the guest cards and place 5 on to their relevant spaces on the board. The remaining cards will form a draw deck.
• Shuffle the staff cards and deal 6 to each player. 
• Give one of each of the 4 coloured cubes to each player to put on to their hotel board.

Turn order
The turn order is a little unusual in Grand Austria Hotel. Every player gets 2 turns in a round. All players are given a token with 2 numbers on it - which is when their turns will occur.
Turns proceed clockwise until all players have had their first turn, then goes back anticlockwise so that the last player was also the first player.
In a 4 player game, the first player will have a token that shows '1/8' and the fourth player will have a token showing '4/5'.
Actions
The first thing the active player can choose to do is to take a guest card from the main game board. Depending on which card is taken, the active player may have to pay for it. 
The further the card is to the left, the more it costs. Gaps in the row are replaced by sliding cards from the left to the right and adding new cards on the furthest left. This is a 'conveyor belt' mechanic.

Action board
Actions in Grand Austria Hotel are determined by dice. The number of dice used depends on the number of players. In a 4 player game, 14 dice are used. The first player rolls all the dice and and places them as required on the action board.

There are 6 columns on the action board. After the dice have been rolled, they are placed in their relevant space. If 3 1's have been rolled, they are placed into the '1' column, this is done for all 6 columns.
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This determines both the effectiveness and number of each action that can be performed. The more dice there are in a column the more effective that action is and the more often it can be performed. Every time an action is performed, a die from that column is removed. If a column has no dice, that action cannot be performed (Unless performing the 'copy action' action!).
The 6 actions are:

1. Take food: For each die in this column a food (Cake or strudel.) cube can be taken by the active player and placed on to their customers in their restaurant or into their kitchen area. However there's a twist here. The active player can never take more cake than strudel. Thus if there were 4 dice in the column, the active player 2 of each, but not 3 cake and 1 strudel.
2. Take drinks: This is identical to taking food, except it applies to wine and coffee cubes. For drinks, the active player cannot take more coffee than wine.
3. Prepare rooms: For each die in this column, the active player may prepare a room on their hotel board. This means they can place the relevant number of room tiles with the 'prepared' side up on their hotel board. Depending on which rooms are prepared, they may be other requirements such as cost.
4. Gain prestige/money: Gain prestige or money equal to the number of dice in this column. 
5. Recruit staff: The active player may pay to recruit a staff card from their hand. The number of  dice in this column deducts from this cost.
6. Copy action: Finally, copy action - as the name suggests, allows the active player to copy any of the 5 other actions. The dice used to determine how effective this action is comes from this column.

One other choice the active player can make is to 'pass'. When a player passes, after all other players have taken both their actions, the remaining dice (Minus 1 die.) are re-rolled and put back on the action board according to their new numbers. Then the players who passed can now act.
Additional actions
As well as the actions listed above, players can perform some extra actions.

• Increase action dice score: The active player can pay to increase the action dice in a column on the action board by +1 for their next action only. This can only be done once per turn.
• Serve customers: The active player can pay to move up to 3 food and drink cubes from their kitchen to customers in their restaurant.
• Use staff card: If a staff card that has a 'once per turn' ability, the active player can use it.
• Move guest: A guest in your restaurant can be moved to their room, provided that their needs have been met and there is a prepared room for them. When they are moved into a room, the room tile is flipped to occupied. As mentioned above, the rooms on a hotel board are grouped into sets, when all the rooms in a set are occupied by the active player, they receive a reward of money, prestige or points.

That's pretty much it for actions.

Endgame
Grand Austria Hotel is played over 7 rounds, thus each player has 14 turns to use.

Prestige is scored at the end of rounds 3, 5 & 7. During prestige scoring, before prestige is scored each player's prestige score is lowered by 3, 5 or 7 in each related round. Prestige points translate in victory points, but if a player's prestige points are too low, that player will lose victory points instead.
Additionally, if a player is above the prestige threshold, they get a bonus, if they are below, the receive a penalty. This depends on the 3 prestige reward/penalty tokens that were placed on to the main board.
 
At the end of the 7th round, points are scored from various sources, such as staff cards, occupied rooms, remaining food, drink & money, objectives and prestige tokens.
Any guests left in your restaurant loses points.
All points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Hotel board at game end. With 2 restaurant guests not served

The game end.

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Overall
So Grand Austria Hotel is a game about acquiring customers, fulfilling their needs and  preparing rooms for them in your hotel.
The game is quite a balancing act as it forces players to juggle preparing rooms and fulfilling the needs of their customers.
Players also need to pay attention to the prestige track, as failing to acquire enough prestige can be seriously detrimental.
The bonus objective can earn quite a lot of points.
Money too can be a problem, it's quite hard to accumulate money and is also something you need to think about.

Whilst there's a lot going on in this game, the rules aren't too complicated.
Optimising strategies is really important here. But the available actions and their effectiveness is unpredictable.
So Grand Austria Hotel forces players to both think ahead and be adaptable, whilst providing players with lots of meaningful decisions.

These are things that make Grand Austria Hotel a good game.