This is America
America is burning. A country once seen as a beacon of democracy, opportunity, and hope is falling apart under the rule of a tinpot despot and his enabling cronies. It is a country that has always been defined by its dreams: you will one day be richer, be happier, be more successful. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Everyone is waiting for the day when they make it big. In order to stupefy the populace, America became a playground of gambling, excess, and distractions. The city that best typifies this is of course Las Vegas. But there are others. The Americana expansion for Lords of Vegas takes us on a tour through the States to revel in distraction.
Regular readers of this site will know that I adore the James Ernest and Mike Selinker designed Lords of Vegas. I picked it up very early in my exploration of the modern hobby and it is probably my most played board game. I was delighted when a reprint came to be through crowdfunding, as the game had been tragically out of print for a long time. Alongside the core game the new owners Lone Shark Games announced an expansion and I couldn’t say no. I’m going to assume a familiarity with Lords of Vegas in this piece, but if you are in need of a refresher I have a review and an In Focus piece on the game.
There have been previous Lords of Vegas expansions. Up, which I own, took the player count to 6 and allowed the vertical building of casinos. It’s a mechanism we have never really bothered with as it feels like it takes away from the jostling for position that makes the game sing. A deck of cards called Underworld brought wacky powers to the proceedings, but I have never had the chance to play it.
Americana is the first expansion to experiment with new boards to play the game on, and it is a decidedly mixed bag. The first two boards step away from the square of the original and go for a table spanning rectangle instead. The board is double sided taking us to Atlantic City and then New Orleans. The second sees us headed to Reno and then back in time to Tombstone.
America’s Playground
The Atlantic City map is probably the simplest of the new additions to wrap your head around. It focuses on one aspect of the core game, the sprawl mechanism. Over the course of a game of Lords of Vegas you get new lots by the draw of a card. These are locked in and can’t be taken away, only traded. You can sprawl to an adjacent space from your casino, paying twice the normal value of the Lot you are going to. However the turn of a card can see ownership change in the blink of an eye.
Atlantic City plays with this mechanism in two ways. If you have the largest casino of a given colour you have the Monopoly on that colour. This makes sprawling in that type of casino $5 million cheaper which is a fairly significant discount, especially early on. You can also find it easier to make larger casinos as the alleyways that lie between each block can be sprawled into for a set amount of $15 million. Not cheap, but a potentially good investment as they can never be taken away from you. The dice that go there are always a 1, so no casino bosses are going to live between casinos. As if they would.
We found this board to be really good fun. Sprawling is a necessity sometimes in the core game, but is always risky and expensive. Taking some of the sting out of sprawling makes it a more attractive proposition. Alongside the different shape of the board, it feels like an easy to understand change that brings new opportunities and strategies.
The Big Easy
The flip side of this board takes us to New Orleans. Here we encounter river boats- mobile 1 tile casinos that attach and detach from the jetties along the banks of the Mississippi river.
Each of the five boats relates to one of the casino colours, and at the start of the game they hold one of each player’s dice. The highest of these dice is the captain and controls not only that casino but where the boat can go. At the start of the game everyone starts with one of these boats under their control.
What this effectively means is that you have a moving casino that can take over other casinos with some clever maneuvering, though it is marred by the way the boats interact with the reorganization mechanism.
The reorganisation action allows folks not in control of a casino, to potentially take over the reins. It’s a moment of high drama, hilarity, and risks ruining the monetary output of the casino as dice clash, get re-rolled, and the values tumble ever downwards.
In New Orleans, whenever a card with a casino colour is drawn, the boat associated with that colour undergoes reorganisation. This becomes quite time consuming, as it happens pretty much every round. If a casino with a boat currently attached reorganizes, the casino and boat are both rolled for separately until you have a captain on the boat and a boss in the casino. The upshot of this is that you are re-rolling dice a lot and it very much begins to feel like a chore.
I can see what the designers were going for here. Having a moveable casino and centering the reorganisation action as core to the board. What it actually succeeds in doing is making an action that is usually a moment of joy and drama, feel pedestrian and dull, turning an exciting event into a piece of administration.
The Biggest Little City
Lets move to Reno next and the lowest player count board. The core Lords of Vegas game technically takes 2-4 players but in reality is best at 4. You want players to be in each other’s faces, fighting for position and striking deals.
The Reno board is for 2-3 players only and makes that setup feel more like a higher player count game with two changes. The board has fewer plots, completely removing the F group from the game. There is also a dummy player hanging around called Johnnie who is ‘no longer around’. Read into that what you will. Their presence is still felt though as the game starts with several of Johnnie’s casinos on the board. The cards that are drawn for these during setup are still in the deck, meaning that they can be grabbed with a lucky draw.
These casinos do get in the way of your developments, and can be the boss of casinos built near them as with the regular rules. As Johnnie is ‘on vacation’ they can’t be traded with, however you can take over these casinos as you might normally. The game even allows you to pay to reorganize casinos only holding Johnnie’s dice.
There is one other change that makes for a really dynamic game. A bridge spans The Strip, connecting the two sides and making connected casinos adjacent/ bigger. When you draw an F block card you discard it and move the bridge, allowing you to suddenly take over, connect, and disconnect different casinos. You then draw another card and keep doing this until you get a Lot that is actually on the board. These F cards still score points and money for the casinos linked to the draw, so you can build up quite the stack of cash for manipulating the game.
I really liked this board and was surprised at how well the 2-player version of Lords of Vegas worked. It felt dynamic, confrontational, with a faster pace than a regular game. Just a great time.
Down amongst the dead men
Finally Americana takes us back in time to the infamous Wild West town of Tombstone. This is the most complicated map by far, introducing characters with powers and a showdown system that uses actual poker cards.
The core of this map revolves around that deck of cards. You start with a few of these cards to your name. The board has fewer spaces than the core game. Whenever you draw a card for a Lot that isn’t present, you enter a ‘Showdown’ causing each player to play poker cards or Fold.
When you play cards it can be as few as one, and it counts as whatever poker hand it represents: high card, pair, etc. Everyone does this in order and must beat the previous hand in order to play cards at all. Whoever wins can do what we referred to as an ‘orbital sprawl’: placing a casino on any empty space on the board. The winner of the showdown loses the cards they played, whereas everyone else gets to refill their hand.
The characters that are corralled around the board, like Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, are also gained through showdowns. The initial one to get them into a player’s hand involves all players. After that it becomes a head-to-head. There are a variety of powers to be had, from being able to re-roll organisation dice to making building cheaper.
The last element that activates a showdown is the gazumping of sprawled properties. Whenever you lose an item in a showdown, you get to draw a card as compensation. You can also buy one card every round for $5 (the setting of this one gets rid of the million for obvious reasons).
Tombstone is a very strange board. The layout takes away the big square and rectangular blocks of the core game and replaces them with C’s joined at The Strip. This means bigger casinos are harder to build and we found the scores across the arc of the game remained pretty tight. On the downside it led to a reduction in the player interaction of the core game, some of which is replaced by the showdown mechanism.
Although the showdowns use poker hands to resolve, it doesn’t really feel like playing poker. You only go round once with the card play, not giving you an opportunity to commit more cards once you see what other folk have got. In fact the play almost felt closer to something like Baccarat.
The added complication of the showdowns doesn’t feel worth it for the player interaction the map removes. Like the different shapes of ‘Atlantic City’ and ‘New Orleans’, we enjoyed the different structures and challenges they brought. The extra mechanisms ladled on top felt more like a distraction than a delight.
Into the Sunset
I have played Lords of Vegas a lot. An awful lot. My main group has played it a lot. I’ve shown it to loads of folk as it is one of my favourite games and I am absolutely delighted that it is more available than it has been for a long time. I am absolutely the target audience for this expansion. Despite that I have no idea how often we will get into these extra maps.
I will be keeping Americana in my collection. ‘Reno’ and ‘Atlantic City’ are definitely worth the space. It isn’t a full-throated recommendation though. The core Lords of Vegas experience is such a tightly designed game of riding tides of fortune, that expanding on it is a tricky proposition. ‘Reno’ gives a great 2-player experience and ‘Atlantic City’ allows for strategies not imaginable on the core map. The other two maps feel less fully formed, and the whole package is a rather muddled experience.
Americana is an expansion that looks at its past but doesn’t fully understand it. It is brash, over-the-top, and unwilling to compromise. An expansions that thinks more is better without questioning why. It is for better and worse a reflection of the country it is set in. At times glistening with hope and possibility, then turning into a confusion of different goals and ideas without any sort of direction. This is America.
Thanks very much for visiting the site and reading this article. You are welcome to comment on the piece below or join our Discord. If you would like to support us financially you can do so via Patreon or one of the other methods on our site.
