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PDX caught my attention because I love a good airline/airport themed game and PDX has great visuals that truly give that retro airport vibe. I was able to play the Deluxe version of PDX via a prototype sent to me by Waterworks Games.
PDX is a worker placement game of building up a independent airline at the Portland Airport (PDX). When I say worker placement, I'm talking about a lone worker that you place. Okay, you are not fully restricted to a single worker: many spaces allow you to both place your worker and put suitcases on another space to take an action on a future turn (I'm sure there is a joke about lost luggage in there somewhere..but at least it always turns up later).
The game has a suggested first play set-up that primes every player with 3 routes (one short/one medium/one long) and a small plane to start and reduces the piles of routes (the end game trigger) by removing one from each stack. This effectively cuts four turns off the beginning of the game that you would spend ramping up to fly and another four turns off the end of the game. Honestly, I think this variant should be the default way to play.
Even with the extremely novel luggage mechanic, the single worker can feel very restrictive. Sure, once you have everything flowing for your airline, you'll be getting resources coming in from landing at destinations along with additional bonus actions/resources that are on every destination tile. So, planes are effectively part time workers. And the game provides a release valve for resource restriction since you can rearrange destinations after they have been placed, allowing you to rig when you will get specific resources...with the caveat that you can't rearrange locations you have already visited or those you currently have a plane on.
Once you have the gist of the game, turns can go blazingly fast. A typical turn is Land Planes, Reclaim Suitcases, Move your worker (and take that action), and Schedule Flights. One reason turns will be fast is many times you won't have any planes to land, you won't have any suitcases to reclaim, so your turn will just be taking a single action and maybe scheduling a flight. Unfortunately, when turns aren't going quickly, they can bog down as a player searches to see if they have the resources to reserve a Destination or start an Ad campaign in order to decide which action they wish to take. Since everyone is pulling from the same pool of Destinations and Ad Campaigns, even if you plan ahead in order to pick up something specific, it might be gone by the time you are able to execute.
Part of the challenge of a worker placement game is wanting to take an action but knowing you don't have enough workers to do it. With only one “full time” worker that is always the case with PDX. It feels like it trips over that line of keeping action selection lean and ends up starving you. Other than the occasional turn of you readying to execute additional actions with Suitcases/landing on destinations, you never really get the feeling of making true, permanent progress. And the restriction of not being able to put a suitcase on a location that would generate another suitcase means the every single office space that is added with the construct action to either the main concourse or your personal concourse can not be triggered with one.
You are also dealing with starting with only six storage spaces for Tokens. Do you really need to take an action to build an extra gate early? Most of the time you won't even have a chance to have four planes in the air at once, but you will definitely want those two extra storage spaces for resources. This is because there are both resources used to secure Destinations and another, entirely different, set of tokens used to claim Ad Campaigns.
Ad Campaigns are pure victory point generation but the items you need to purchase these both take up space on your board and are another four different “activity tokens” you'll be collecting. Okay, I admit it cracks me up to be taking up space at your airline with a palm tree and a soccer ball but, with the way the destinations work, you'll likely be generating plenty of, say, pillars but be starved for anything to spend them on. I found myself wishing for a way to flush the ad campaign market instead of just hoping someone else was able to purchase one in order to get some different ones available...especially if you are playing with others who have no desire to pursue an Ad heavy strategy. Having 3 or, god forbid, 4 Activity Tokens clogging up your 8 total storage space is frustrating and you are loathe to discard them because they are so hard to secure.
Your personal airline starts with three small gates which can be upgraded. There are Small, Medium, and Large gates but be aware that medium gates will let you use both Small and Medium Planes and that Large Gates will allow you to use Small, Medium and Large planes...with the compromise that you will go to fewer destinations in both cases. As I stated earlier, there is a free action that allows you to rearrange your Destination Tiles to focus when and what your rewards will be on a given turn. This is great when players use this action while another player is taking their turn. However, many times you'll find players will need/want to adjust this before landing their planes, which can uncomfortably extend turn length.
Time is an illusion, airport time doubly so. Even when using the quick start variant, PDX lingers on the table for longer than I wanted it to. Sure, I never expect a game to clock in with the time printed on the box (30 to 75 minutes) but it ends up coming out to about 30+ minutes per player.
PDX takes a bit too long to get off the ground, stays in the air for longer than needed, serves a scarce amount of actions during the flight, and lacks leg room for storing the resources. While providing a serviceable gaming experience, it lacks the smooth, seamless flight I was hoping for.
A prototype of this release was provided by the publisher. Therewillbe.games would like to thank them for their support.
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