Oranienburger Kanal: On Bridges And Ditches

Oranienburger Kanal (or just Kanal) is a very weird entry in Uwe Rosenberg’s repertoire. For starters, the original edition is put out by Spielworxx, a questionable publisher that is known for cutting corners when it comes to box and component quality—unfortunately, they live up to that name for this game as well. Then there’s the whole limited availability of the game as it was a small Kickstarter-like batch that initially got printed and had a small reprint with another publisher with totally different art that is even uglier. Kanal never saw any game store shelf. Since it came out in 2023, your only option to snatch a copy is through very expensive offers in the second hand market. Mikko’s Game Blog eventually made me do it. And finally, although Rosenberg is listed as the “designer” on the box and on BGG, in the credits of the manual, under “execution”, Henning Kröpke and Uli Blennemann are listed, and under the solo variant, Peter Schmähler and Carsten Burak. Did Uwe dream of industrial boats and ditches and leave the implementation up to others?

I wish he hadn’t. Mechanically speaking, Kanal could feel like a very much streamlined version of Ora & Labora because of the signature resource wheel and the spatial element involved when placing buildings. So no complaints at all here: the core of the game is very, very good. But the execution of it feels lacking: the iconography is simply put terrible and while the box game art is lovely, the rest of it could be called questionable at best. None of the building cards actually feel like buildings because of the plethora of symbols and text on them. The card sizes are the same as in Ora & Labora, and there, partially thanks to Klemens Franz’s lovely artwork, it really felt like expanding a cloister.

In Kanal, I feel disconnected with the main theme. Some of the triggers on the card also make little sense putting even less emphasis on their name and function. The separate small worker placement board and the discs that represent something—what exactly, “industrial workers”? who knows?—feel cheap. I have no idea why the resource wheel is as big as it is. And worst of all, the box dimensions is an insult to your limited shelf space: its bulky square size could just as well be almost halved if the main board would be pliable.

So why would you bother with this game at all? Because its main gameplay loop is so damn good. Kanal is a real brain burner from the get-go, even though there are only seven spots available to send your “worker disc” to, compared to the 30+ of a game like A Feast For Odin. You’re either collecting basic resources, placing buildings, and/or building bridges or roads. Your basic resources are wood, clay, coal, and your pristine ones are stone and iron. That’s it. But you can’t just grab iron, even though you’ll need it the most: for that, the resource wheel needs to turn and convert the basic resources into the advanced ones. This is very different from Ora & Labora: in Kanal, the wheel divides the basic and advanced resources, and either at the end of the turn it converts one into the other, or you can do that in-between turns by paying 2 coins.

Placing buildings comes with a cost, and usually, that includes an advanced resource or two, which you’ll be scrambling for, but since there are only four or five workers (depending on the amount of players) before the round ends, you’re constantly trying to optimize what to do. Since new buildings appear at the end of every round, you’ll want to keep on building as not doing it comes at the risk of the other player occupying that precious build slot, or even at the risk of losing the building card that gets cycled away (in solo mode). In total, three small decks of buildings see play (green, orange, blue-coloured ones, see photo) from the basic do-this-get-that ones to the late-game pay-a-lot-but-earn-huge-points ones.

The funny part is that by placing a building, nothing happens. Nothing—besides counting towards points at the end of the game, of course. You have to activate the building to reap the benefits and you do that by enclosing it with road types (dirt, stone, railroads, waterways). You can even activate it a second time by connecting buildings and with the help of 2 bridges. And this is where the brilliance of the gameplay shines, where you can feel it to be the most “Uwe-like”.

Yet none of my friends were enthusiastic after I introduced them to the game. I only managed to get a lukewarm response from three of them, and yes, I admit: paying more than €100 for this flimsy box is ridiculous. I think the biggest problem here is the sub-par representation. I also don’t really know if you should get this, even if it were easily available, if you already are content with your current Uwe Rosenberg board game collection. For me, Kanal categorizes as a wonderful solo game that’s easy to pull out and set up, and is done in about thirty minutes, depending on how long you keep on damaging that brain of yours. Kanal is a 1 to 2-player only game which is a bold move considering Fields of Arle is much more thematic, and in the end, fun to play together. But Arle is more painful to set up and takes longer. It’s also a completely different kind of game.

I don’t think I’ll ever again suggest bringing Kanal to the table during a game night: there are better, more beautiful, and more engaging two-player games to play that fit that timeslot, such as the recent Lord of the Rings: The Duel. This isn’t a punishing Uwe game like Agricola, and it’s not a sandbox game like Arle and Odin either. So for me, Kanal ends up being this weird little duck that is fun to play but painful to look at, provided you do it yourself. But not a requirement to have. Perhaps Black Forest or Glass Road are the best Uwe games using his resource wheel, but until I played those, I think Kanal is.

• Total plays? 10. Easy to sneak in, even on a tired on a weekday evening.
• Solo friendly? Yes. I categorize this as a solo-only game.
• Two-player friendly? Somewhat—but you might get frustrated by a classic worker placement blockage.
• Quality? Bad. The box is ridiculous, the card iconography is a joke, and the art is so-and-so.

Keep or Cull? Keep (for now). I like this as a crunchy solo game that doesn’t take too long. It’s also very easy to learn as the game initially doesn’t feel as overwhelming compared to other Uwe worker placement games. That being said, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t play solo.