With SPIEL ’22 opening just over a month from this date, I will start posting first impressions of upcoming game releases that publishers have sent me ahead of that show. Normally I prefer to play many times with varying player counts before covering a game, but perhaps in this situation it’s better to have more posts on more games. —WEM
Designer Toni Lopez has published three games to date: Sant Jordi: La llegenda in 2020, with this being a two-player game recreating the battle of Saint George and the dragon; Rocódromo, a 2021 release in which you draft colored sticks to make your way up a climbing wall; Air Mail, which will debut from Ludonova at SPIEL ’22.
As you set up the game board, Air Mail feels familiar. You have a giant map of Canada (if playing with 2-3 players) or the United States (for 2-5 players, although recommended for higher player counts), with cities connected by route lines and with each player having their own set of planes. You’re building an airline network, yes? Yes!
The game board is divided into six colored divisions, and you start with four domino-style permit cards in hand, the colors on these cards matching the division colors. On a turn, you do one of two things:
• Place a permit card on either end of the line of permit cards that starts on the left side of the game board.
• Ask for a grant.
When you place a permit card, you have to match the color on the end, which activates the matching division for the remainder of your turn. You have three action points to spend on four possible actions, with only the first one being repeatable:
• Claim a route that has at least one end in the active division.
• Deliver a package that originates from or is delivered to the active division.
• Advance your technology marker.
• Draw a new permit.
When you deliver a package, you can traverse only as many routes as your technology level, the first route of the delivery must be on a route you own, and — most importantly — the start and end point of the delivery must be in different divisions. You represent airline companies that are trying to land air mail delivery contracts in the 1920s, so you have to imagine that mail delivery with a division is handled by trucks; you must be working on a broader scale to justify your business, so going on an interdivisional route is a must.
You can deliver only once to a city, and your reward is based on the length of the route, as shown in the lower-right of the game board. Opponents receive $1 in income each time you use one of their routes, so you want connectivity, but don’t let those small giveaways deter you from achieving larger goals.
Each city has a matching card in its division deck, and you start with two cards from different divisions in hand. Deliver a package to that city, and you receive $2-4 at game’s end. You (generally) gain more of these cards as a reward for delivering packages, and you can (generally) deliver a package only once a turn, so you need to keep delivering at a steady pace to ensure progress. Note that you can deliver a package to any city, not only those that match division cards in hand, and every delivery of length 3 or longer earns you money, which is your long-term goal.
As in Ticket to Ride, you effectively have short tickets and long tickets because cities like Memphis and Salt Lake City are only one route away from a different division, so you can deliver to them across only a single route, but a one-route delivery has no reward other than any bonus token in that space and the presence of the package itself. Delivering to Miami or Burlington takes more work since the closest external division is many routes away, but you’re rewarded for that effort through income and (possibly) cards.
When you set up the game, you place nine of twelve postal service decree cards on indicated spaces of the permit path around the perimeter of the board. When someone places on a permit card on this space, that player finishes their turn, then everyone scores that postal service decree. Thus, you have intermediate goals throughout the game, whether that’s creating a chain of packages or claimed routes, delivering to major and minor cities, having a route in multiple divisions, or discarding permit cards of various colors.
The second action possible on a turn — asking for a grant — allows you to pick up a permit card or a special joker permit, then you move your “executive plane” along the path of permit cards to take the action on the space you occupy. This grant action can be a delaying tactic, as when you don’t want to take an action in the division(s) that would be activated or don’t have matching permit cards, but it can also allow you more freedom. You can claim any two unclaimed routes on the game board, for example, or deliver one package anywhere (so long as it crosses a division border), or draw two division cards from different divisions. The fourth action on the permit path is to boost your technology two levels, something I think my fellow players underestimated in our game.
Final board state
When six postal service decree cards have been scored in a game with 4-5 players (or five in a 2-3 player game), you complete the round, then play one final round, then score for completed division cards in hand, with a bonus based on the number of divisions in which you delivered a package.
Based on my single four-player game on a review copy, Air Mail feels like a thoroughly modern Eurogame, with players taking relatively quick and tiny turns that are driven by the needs of public short-term and private long-term goals. You will undoubtedly make poor choices in your first game, especially when it comes to the “must cross a division border” restriction on package delivery, and you’ll regret certain routes you built, but then carry on because what other choice do you have?
The permit path might feel random and arbitrary — why can I take actions only in blue and purple when I have no presence there? — but that’s kind of the point. Ideally when you lay a permit card, you can force the next player into bad options. Don’t leave an open orange option when the next player is clearly building in orange! Or place your permit card so that the next player has a choice of red or red. Alternatively, I might be thinking about this all wrong because perhaps I should be more willing to give money to others in order to deliver packages over long routes, which means I’m fine with them spending their actions to build whereas I will focus on repeated deliveries.
I built only in the west and north, so I felt hamstrung when the permit options didn’t match my division colors, but if I had built just two interdivisional routes connecting, say, orange to blue and orange to purple, then I could have delivered to all three of those divisions, earning vastly more income in the endgame bonus. Hard to say, especially since the pace of the game will be driven by how often players choose the “ask for a grant” action instead of pressing forward on the permit path.
We were all tripped up by the teensy typeface used on the postal service decree cards, asking others to re-read them at various times during the game to prepare for an upcoming scoring, but I suppose in time you’ll absorb the graphics used to recall the meaning. The scoretrack also hampered us due to the lack of numbers other than multiples of 5s, and those multiples being in a different shape. You would think that the different shape would help you jump easily by fives, but for the most part you’re earning income in chunks of $1-3, and we found ourselves counting only the white squares and skipping the diagonal spaces. Weird.
Finally, players start with $10-14 depending on their position in turn order, yet the game has no way to spend or lose money, so why start with anything? I learned the reason for this decision only when I re-read the rulebook and noticed the existence of promotional postal decree cards that punish you for not connecting to major cities or different divisions. The text for these promotional cards is included in the rulebook, so in theory you could make tiny cards labeled A-Q, deal out nine cards on the board at random, then give everyone a homemade cheat sheet so that they know what each card does without needing to ask. Something to prepare for next game, I suppose…
