11.5. Grand Austria Hotel
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/182874/grand-austria-hotel
1 play with 2 players in 2023
In Grand Austria Hotel you manage a hotel and its restaurant, attracting guests, fulfilling their orders, and prepping their rooms so they can stay after they've eaten. The game is played over the course of seven rounds, and each round you get two main actions, which you get by drafting dice that are rolled each round. The die's face tells you what action you're taking and the frequency of that die from the roll tells you the strength of the action, so with each action taken, the remaining action becomes weaker.
It would be pretty fair to call GAH a multiplayer solitaire - you can interact by competing for guests, racing for common objectives, and drafting dice, but overall you're focused largely on taking what's best for your hotel and what's the most efficient action available to you. It's a classic eurogame in that you'll always feel resource-constrained - whether that's cash, food items, available rooms, or especially the Emperor Track (a check similar to feeding workers that happens three times a game). Like so many of these games where you have a super-limited number of actions, your actions can trigger combos and give you a pretty great payoff.
I only played GAH once with four players, and that was my first go. I think the downtime is probably too significant, especially because turn order goes snake-draft style (1-2-3-4-4-3-2-1), which is too much for such a solitary game. But at two it's definitely a nice go-to for a couple that doesn't particularly need a ton of player interaction in their games, and it's got a super-cute theme to go with it.
yet all azuarc of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness