Great unboxing video. This is my first Euro type game coming from playing advanced historical war games since the 70s. Pan Am really captures the flavor and glamor of the early days of aviation. Components are first rate allowing those who love airlines to enjoy the quality airliner pieces, the wonderfully great graphics of world routes and destinations. I find that when the board is set up and in play I can’t help but be mesmerized by how cool it all is. But it also is a clever all around game that can also be enjoyed by non airline aficionados. You control a fledgling airline in the midst of Pan Am expanding globally. Pan Am is controlled by the game's AI mechanisms. Build routes to gain income with the goal of owning the most Pan Am stock at the end of the game. As Pan Am expands and buys out your and other airline’s routes, they pay out a premium based on its length. You build routes by acquiring landing rights, and assigning an aircraft type to it. You start out the game with three of the early short range aircraft and as the time frame shifts, the other longer range planes become available. The game has plenty of options to go about route building. You’ll balance the need for more aircraft, landing rights and how much stock you think you can buy at the end of each round. Stock is low in the beginning, but you also need to expand, so do you gamble it will stay low and wait to buy? Do you try to anticipate where Pan Am will expand in order to get bought out, or do you build routes for initial income sake. Decisions, decisions. There are seven rounds and four different event cards for each round. Each event sets the stock price, how much Pan Am will expand and other worldly events which will affect play. One event card is picked at random for each round. With four cards and seven rounds, that makes 16,384 unique combinations of events. That in addition with other random features of the game should make re-playabilty quite robust. As an aside, a husband and wife posted on another site that they had gotten the game after eagerly awaiting it. To get in the mood they donned First Class pajamas from a couple different airlines and opened a bottle of Champagne. Now that's the way to play! ✈️
Thanks for the indepth explanation of the gameplay. I think you get the prize for the longest comment ever posted to Flight Brothers FT! It is really a beautiful game.
Liked your view so much I ran over to Target and got my own copy. What I saw made me say, "That's just our kind of game!" It's a victory-point accumulation game, that in this case are called "stocks," more than a property acquisition style game like monopoly. I really like the sense of historical period and activity (I can just imagine those engineering groups running around the world) with some cool operational feel as well. My comments, like yours here, are only based on the contents of the box and a reading of the rules. Looking forward to playing it soon.
