Great Western Trail: El Paso Board Game Review

After taking the Great Western Trail: El Paso for a spin around the block a few times I’ve come to one of two conclusions. If you love the Great Western Trail, you probably aren’t going to enjoy the streamlined nature of this experience, unless of course you enjoy franchises you love that offer faster experiences. If you hate the Great Western Trail, El Paso isn’t going to change that philosophy. If you hate the Great Western Trail because it’s too long, then this might be the game for you.

There is an obvious market for games we love in a bite-sized box (not necessarily always bite sized). If you want Everdell on steroids, you play that with expansions. You want the streamlined version, you play Everdell: Farshore. Love Ticket to Ride but need something that plays in 30 minutes or less? Why not take a Ticket to Ride Berlin or Paris for a spin. That philosophy applies here. Love The Great Western Trail but want that experience, but more condense? Then try El Paso.

El Paso is driven by movement, where your meeple lands, and cards. So. Many. Cards. It all works well though, which I quite enjoy, and it’s fluid and intuitive as well. After moving a set number of spaces, players will perform actions at buildings, or auxiliary actions on their own boards.

These actions have a wide range of effects and bonuses, but you’ll purchase workers, build buildings, earn coins for cattle you discard and so much more. Determining where to go is completely up to you within your movement, and multiple people can occupy the same location at a single time.

The slower you move around the board, though, the less you’ll visit El Paso and theoretically the less points you earn. There is a huge decision space here that I really enjoy, and one that will really make you think twice about how quickly you move versus taking actions you think are valuable.

Many of the actions you take revolve around worker cards: builders, engineers, and cowboys. Cowboys let you wrangle cattle, engineers let you do things on the train, and builders let you build new buildings into town.

There are also wild workers that cost an additional amount of coin after being purchased, but give players a ton of flexibility, especially when you start constructing buildings that require a ton of builder workers! What I like is that these cards are discarded after use to YOUR discard pile, and you’ll be seeing them again as you shuffle and continue to draw. Further, these cards don’t count towards your hand limit, so anytime you draw a worker this way, it is put into your active pool for use later.

Ultimately, you are working to get a good hand of cattle cards before you hit El Paso. When you do, you’ll add up your cattle score by counting unique cattle values and adding any bonuses, and then palace a disc from your player board onto the central board, earning points and more. What disc you choose is important, as it upgrades abilities on your board for use later. I love this dual purpose idea here – not only are you getting something for turning in your cattle, but you are getting upgrades too.

Ultimately, this game just works really well in my opinion. Sure, some things from the base versions of this have been stripped away to create a more accessible, faster experience. That being said, the core concepts, I believe, are still present. You know you are playing a Great Western Trail game, whether it’s “fully featured” or not.

Again, I can see some not loving this experience, opting to play larger and longer games of other Great Western Trail titles. But for me and my gaming group, as much as we enjoy a lengthy game of Great Western Trail, this experience just suits the play style better.