Pipeline

This game brought the designer Ryan Courtney into limelight. He has developed a superb , crunchy economic board game in the form of Pipeline and with it has given the world his own signature style of Pipeline/tubes route building in games. Every Good designer has his/her signature style in the games. Uwe has polyominoes and farming themes, Lacerda has great interlocking elements, Pfister has excellent multi use cards and now Ryan has tubes and route building. But mind you, that building pipeline network is only a small portion of the game. The meat of the game lies in how efficiently you build your network, upgrade your network by buying pipes, tanks , machines etc. You need these to refine your oil because the more you refine, there are better chances to get hold of good contracts , fulfill orders and sell refined oil at high prices. But to buy these , you need money and money is hard to come by in the game , especially if you don't play the game efficiently.

This game came out in 2019 and it was a year that saw some really superb games. This was one of the best of 2019 and i find this game as good as Barrage(another 2019 game) and Brass, two of my favourite economic board games. Artwork by Ian O Toole is fantastic. Rulebook is good and explains everything quite clearly. It doesn't take much time to teach this game and can be played in 2 hours with 4 players. But it will take lot of practice to master this game and become an expert at the efficiency puzzle this game provides you with. Among the several denomination of money tokens this game has, one is 500 dollars token. Don't ever think you have mastered this game unless you start utilising these tokens in your game Components are nice (there are lot of components). The art on the box cover is one of the best i have seen. It's sad the logistics handled it so poorly that i got a broken box. Fortunately all the components are safe.