I’ve been on quite the Vladimir Suchy kick lately. He’s a prolific board game designer that has had some hits and misses with me, but more often than not, I find joy in his games. As I said in my Suchy Round Up, a Suchy game is generally a tight economic euro game with an interesting action selection mechanisim. Praga Caput Regni, Woodcraft, and Underwater Cities are the best examples of this.

Shipyard, was one of Suchy’s first published designs, way back in 2009. In 2023, it was treated to a second edition, which, beyond a complete graphical overhaul, most of the gameplay mechanics remain intact, perhaps speaking to the strength of the design. But let’s hold off on our judgment until the end, shall we?

In Shipyard, players each manage a shipyard during the turn of the dawn of the industrial age. The demand for ships, both commercial and military, are only growing, so it’s up to you to build the best ships to accrue the most points to win the game.

I’m starting the review with this picture of the obscene amount of cardboard sprues that comes in the box. I don’t know who the cardboard engineer is over at Delicious Games, but they certainly make punching out a board game interesting. Not only are there 175 crew and equipment tiles, but there are also 100 ship tiles, a cardboard bit holder that you need to assemble, a cardboard crane to hold those ship tiles while you play the game, but Shipyard makes you embark on a DIY craft mission to achieve dual layer player boards, and to make the action tile queue and game timer gear work properly. And by that I mean there are thin cardboard frames that you need to use adhesive stickers to achieve dual layered goodness.

Personally, I usually quite enjoy punching out games and assembling things. It feels like cardboard Lego. But I certainly wasn’t expecting it, which is a bit of a damper when I show up to game night and the host is only just pulling the shrink wrap off the game. A bit of a barrier to get started if you’re hoping to squeeze your first play of Shipyard into a somewhat tight time slot.

As I said before, the action selection mechanism is novel at the very least. Each of the actions in the game sit in a queue, and on your turn, you place your cube onto one of the actions. For every cube that’s further left on the track compared to yours, you earn a single coin. Then at the start of your next turn, you pick up the tile that your cube is on, and slide it in from the right, turning the gear that tracks how long the game takes.

It’s a pretty elegant system, dynamically adjusting the value of the actions as players take actions and slide them down a track, instead of something more pedestrian like dropping a coin onto all the unused actions each round. The game timer wheel spins around, and the cube will fall into a little slot, telling you it’s time to take a cube out of the row. Around halfway through, you’re instructed to toss some of your endgame victory points. I quite like that you don’t have to commit to and endgame victory point condition until about halfway through the game. Really lets you pivot from one plan to another, depending on how the game is shaking out.

As I said before, in Shipyard, you are trying to build ships, and almost all the actions available to you are in service of that goal. One of the central boards has a large wheel with 4 rings, each one supplying players with a different resource or ability. 4 of the 8 actions correspond to those rings. Beyond that, you can take commodity tiles, which allow you to trade for the resources at ever so slightly more efficient rate than the ring actions, another just gives you two coins, which in my opinion is largely worthless. The last two actions are claiming a canal tile, and taking 1 to 3 ship tiles.

You use the canal tiles to build a personal stream next to your board that kind of functions as building your own personal victory point track. When you take ship tiles, and complete a ship (a ship is complete when it was a bow, 1 to 7 middle pieces, and a stern), at the end of your turn, your newly completed ship will have a shakedown cruise, where you’ll determine it’s speed, and have it sail down your personal canal, earning points for the crew and equipment on the ship when it sails onto specific icons on your canal.

The real weakness of this action selection system is the fact that the goal of the game is to build ships, and there is only one way to get ship tiles. When a player takes the ship tiles action, no one else can take it until after that player’s next turn, when they slide it all the way to the right of the queue. We quickly found that you simply cannot afford to skip that action when it’s your turn to take it. Ships are the only way to earn victory points in Shipyard, and while you may be tempted to delay taking ship tiles for one extra turn just to really optimize the ship you want to complete, but doing so means you’ll be locked out of the ship tile action for another 3 rounds.

All of this complaining about being blocked out of actions or having no good actions available to you, or money being useless, I should mention there is a bonus action you can take, where you spend 6 coins to take a second action on your turn, which can be any action, even the one you took last turn, or one that is currently covered by another players cube. That does alleviate my problems somewhat, but not by much. It feels bad to essentially skip your main action to earn coins, just to spend all the coins you earned on a ‘wild’ action next round, assuming everyone else’s cubes were to the right of the coins action. Perhaps that’s just my loss aversion kicking in.

Near the end of the game, you’ll likely have all the tools and equipment you require for your final ship, and you’re just waiting for your turn to take the ship tiles action. In my play, a few of us expressed that on our turn, there was literally nothing valuable worth doing. All the actions we wanted to take were occupied, and the ones remaining, like coins, felt like a waste, especially on your last turn. If you don’t have the money to take the wild action, your last turn, you can take money? Sure, it’s a consequence of your own poor planning, but at the end of the game, no one is going to be taking the resource voucher action, or the money action, and probably not the player power action, making the rest of the actions so much more valuable if they happen to be open when it’s your turn.

The actions of Shipyard are specific and narrow, which makes it a fairly easy game to teach, but it offers no wiggle room. If the Ship tiles action is covered, there’s no other way to take ship tiles. I’m reminded of Agricola, and how that game has various ways to get all the resources you may need. Sure, the space that produces 3 wood each round is going to be the one taken most often, but sometimes the 2 wood action can accrue over a few rounds to give out 6 wood. It has a natural balancing effect, making all the actions feel useful at some point in the game.

In the end, I don’t think Shipyard is a bad game by any stretch. I really liked the canal aspect where you create your own victory point track, and really maximizing your ship speed to land on the Blue Riband space as your last movement, doubling your speed points, and the end game victory points did seem to be fairly varied. I always like it when you get end game victory point conditions, but don’t need to pick until the game is underway.

But all that being said, I found Shipyard to be kind of boring. The actions are narrow and don’t offer any wiggle room. The action selection design is supposed to create a tension between a totally optimized ship and the availability of the actions, but to often it devolves into turns where any meaningful decision-making is totally absent. There’s ship tiles are slightly varied in the equipment mounting points and life preserving equipment, which can modify the points each ship is worth, but building ships is the only way to earn points, it’s less important to have exactly the right equipment, and much more important to just get a ship onto the water at all costs. There aren’t multiple paths to victory. If you’re not building ships, you aren’t earning victory points. The actions you take to achieve this are repetitive and boring, and on all of your turns, nearly half of the actions will be inaccessible to you. Shipyard is a game about building ships, so it stands to reason that building ships is the path to victory. But if that’s all there is, and everyone has an equal footing, the whole game is just about being slightly more efficient with your actions than your opponents, and lucking into the ship and canal tiles that synergies together well.

Shipyard is probably my least favourite Vladamir Suchy game I’ve played to date, which is a shame. But hey, not every game is for every person, and at least it makes Evacuation more likely to make it back to my table!