World’s Fair 1893 Board Game First Impressions

World’s Fair 1893 has cubes, cards and lots of colours.

Better than the wheel thing.

The World’s Fair 1893 in Chicago was a spectacular international exhibition that showcased many great achievements in science, technology, culture, and entertainment. Acting as organisers of the fair, players work diligently to increase their influence throughout the fair and obtain the grand exhibits that will be put on display. The organiser who has earned the best reputation when the fair begins will emerge the victor.

Well, this is an easy one to explain 🙂

You have a board around a Big Wheel made up of 5 sections that you can put in any order.

Each of these sections has 2 cards assigned to it and everyone puts a cube of their colour in each section.

Your Turn

On your turn, you put a cube of your colour in any one section, take the cards assigned to it and then add a new card from the deck to that section, plus the next two sections in clockwise order. Each section has a card limit of 3 or 4 so if a section is full you skip it until all 3 cards are placed.

If you pick up Midway tickets you move the Carriage 1 space per ticket.

Influential Figures

On future turns, you may have picked up some ‘Influential Figures’ cards. Now when you place a cube, but before collecting cards you MUST either play them all for their abilities or if you don’t want to play any of them you can discard some instead. Their abilities mostly involve you adding more cubes to the board but you can never carry them over to your next turn.

When the carriage gets back to the start space the round ends and you have some scoring.

Firstly, the player/s with the most Midway Tickets get 2 coins and all players get 1 coin per Midway ticket collected and they are discarded.

Then you score each area for majorities. Whoever has the most and second most cubes in a region will score rosettes. You also get to cash in Tickets matching that section’s colour for tokens of that colour. This is all dependent on your position but usually, only 2 people will get to do it.

After this you remove half your cubes from each section rounded down and start a new round.

After 3 rounds the game ends…

You score your different colour tokens by collecting sets of different colours for more points. You get 1 point per coin and the face value of the rosettes. Most points win.

World’s Fair 1893 Summary

So that’s that… 40 mins give or take… Play a cube, take cards, put out cards, 3 scoring round and the game end…

The first play was interesting enough I want a second one and everyone else thought it was good too. Turns are generally lightning quick but there were a couple of occasions where extra thought was required. This includes one turn where I just couldn’t decide what to do…

But, World’s Fair 1893 is a good game overall and although quite light, the best player will win. Hopefully, repeat plays are as fun as this first one.

Jesta ThaRogue