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REVIEW
Yukon Airways
Never on Mondays
Growing up in the Canadian territory of Yukon, author Al Leduc was familiar with bush planes from an early age as his
father ran the airline Yukon Airways. According to the intro text, it still exists today, but offers
helicopter services now. Before the wilder- ness became accessible by land, seaplanes were mainly used for transport and supply.
The starting point in the game is very realistically the capital Whitehorse, where two thirds of the Yukon population lives.
The goal of this pick-up-and-deliver game is to make the most money by skillful passenger transport. First, small colorful cubes are placed on the destinations of the map board, which
covers mainly the Yukon, but also shows parts of neighboring Cana- dian provinces and Alaska. The passengers to be trans-
ported are symbolized by colored dice, each color corresponding to
a different desired destination. This is where the thematic imple- mentation disconnects, because in terms of the game mecha- nism, the only thing that matters
is that the color of the dice and the cubes match, the
location of the cube is irrelevant for the passenger.
Six days of the week are flight days; Monday is a day off. Every day represents one round that is divided into several phases. At first, the passengers are desig- nated by dice rolls to wait at six different gates. The active pilot takes dice of the
same color from one of the gates and puts them on his plane, meaning adds them to his seaplane card. The
more people he takes along, the less fuel he has left. In the next phase, the pilot places one or more destination tickets, flies his figure there from the Whitehorse starting space, reduces his fuel gauge accordingly, and unloads the travelers. For each passenger, he receives a cube from the destination. The greater the dis-
tance, the better the
payout
from the
bank. The import-
ant thing is that the cube
and dice colors match as it gives
a personal advantage for the rest of the game. This is clearly displayed on the per- sonal board that depicts an instrument panel which supports the impression that as pilot you are sitting in your cockpit.
I Without fuel reserves, flying is difficult
The costs for the flight back to White-
horse at the end of the day are not con- sidered. Here the author clearly foregoes a simulation in order to avoid a pilot run- ning out of fuel and getting stranded in the wilderness. This undoubtedly makes sense from a gameplay point of view as there is no shortage of strategic chal-
lenges. A total of twelve different benefits are avail- able, seven of them are improvements that can be unlocked and another
les, the value of which can be grad- ually increased in sev-
eral steps.
The collecting of
the cubes might seem trivial at first, but that is deceiv- ing. The point of reference at the beginning are the ticket cards with whose help one wants to create as many color matches as effi- ciently as pos- sible. How you
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