1930: The Golden Age of Airlines

1930: The Golden Age of Airlines fits comfortably beside the economic racing and network games that inspired the session: it develops well without inflating itself beyond the familiar Rio Grande level of complexity. Our first four-player game followed the manual exactly, with no FAQ or house rules, and the first five rounds were excellent. Then the last round arrived, every company maxed out everything, and the winner felt close to random. That is a difficult ending to forgive in a four-hour game.

The centre of the design is the tech track, with expansions opening gates into new colours. The opening move looks like a forced tech upgrade for a player's main company; in Canada, even if all four players do it, the fourth cannot find a route across 26 income. The same pattern returns later: enter orange first, then write down a gain of thirty-something. The interesting decision is not whether to exploit the opening, but whether you can get there before everyone else.

Turn order matters enormously, especially in round one. Miss 23 and sit merely to the right of first player, and you begin at a substantial disadvantage. The extra upgrade is priced almost comically lightly, while dividends stop increasing at 176+ precisely when they ought to keep separating the companies; beyond the difficult 225, three or four dollars per step rather than two would give the scale a genuine purpose. Once everyone reaches the same finishing line, the economy loses its final discriminator.

The disappointing finish does not erase a mechanism package with enough depth to deserve another look under careful amendments: fewer rounds, as the designer also suggests, or a first box in each colour where an expansion permits only one gate in the new colour and the other at a lower one; perhaps bidding for turn order as well. As printed, 1930 is a very good economic game that undermines itself at the exact moment it ought to be settling the accounts.