Review of Grand Austria Hotel – Still As Charming As It Is Brutal

Maybe it’s the time of the year—as I write this, it’s April, so before UKGE, Gen Con, and way before SPIEL—, but lately there have been few new releases that truly got me excited. Sure, I backed myself a copy of Brass: Pittsburg, but that’s mainly out of “professional curiosity” and because I was going to order those metal Iron Clays anyway, so I might as well. I’m also having a good time with the recently fulfilled Nippon: Zaibatsu and will surely write about it at a later point. But overall 2026 so far has been rather slow as a gaming year for me. Which means it’s an excellent time to revisit some of the classics and see how they are holding up! They not only can often be picked up for a fraction of the price of the latest hotness but were designed at a time when game mechanisms still reigned above component quantity/quality as the primary selling point of a game. On the flip side, tastes in gaming have evolved and some former hits are hardly playable today. So to celebrate my 100th…