Jumbled jalopy

Horseless Carriage is set back at the dawn of the automobile. Back when car designers were still deciding what needed to be on a car. Brakes, for instance, weren’t necessarily seen as a necessity. The main part of the game sees you laying out your factory floors in a tight, congested tile-placement problem. Each of your mainlines (the spots on the factory floor where the cars are assembled) needs to be connected to a station where a thing is added to it. Doors, brakes, engines, radiators – even the paint job – these can all be added to the cars you create if you can link them orthogonally to the correct side of a mainline. Each station can be connected to multiple mainlines too, if you manage to link to them.

The problem you’ll very quickly learn is that space on the factory floor is very limited. It can be really tricky to find the space you need. Space optimisation and planning is crucial. Not just important – crucial. Delbert Wilkins levels of crucial (ask your parents). The real kick in the teeth is knowing that once you’ve decided what goes where in the factory, you cannot move it. Not ever. Nor can you remove something to make space for something else. Once something’s bolted down it stays there. At the end of each planning phase you have to add another extension board to your factory, which just presents you with another set of tough choices while you decide which direction you want to expand into.

Each piece you add to a car is colour-coded, with each colour representing a selling feature, like reliability, safety etc. Different customers of the sales board demand different numbers of each feature, so to make the big bucks you need to make sure your cars deliver enough of those features. It’s not enough to just to make the cars, you also need to market and sell them too. How do you do this? You add dealerships and marketing departments. The fly in the ointment is that dealerships need to be adjacent to a mainline too, but dealerships are big and take up lots of space. Space that you want to use for stations to add things to your cars.

If you think games like Isle of Cats, A Feast For Odin, or even Barenpark are tricky tile-placement puzzles, then you ain’t seen nothing yet. Horseless Carriage is a harsh, unforgiving mistress. Too harsh? Depends how much you like agonising over every single placement you make. The factories feel so small sometimes. It’s less ‘knife fight in a phone booth’ and more ‘just-in-time supply chain and logistics in a phone booth’.

Brain not fried yet? We can fix that.

The spatial planning of the factory could genuinely be a game on its own. It’s not far off from what’s happening in Fit To Print (review here) for the entire game. As you might expect though, this is Splotter, and they’ve got a few more tricks up their sleeve.

The biggest part of the shared main board is the Market Board which represents your potential customers and their demands. Some of the spaces are populated by a neutral deck, but each player gets to choose where new demand will spring from in each round of the game too. Customers’ x and y positions on the grid indicate their demand based on the the current spec axes for the round. In one round you might have people who just want a little reliability and safety, while in the next their might be people who insist on higher standards for the cars’ range and design. Your own factory’s production is measured by how many features matching these specs you can deliver, so there’s plenty of foresight required when you conduct research.

Oh yeah, research. Another part of the puzzle. You can add research depts to your boards to move your company’s marker up each of the spec tracks, increasing the variety of stations you can add to your factory, hopefully meeting market demand later in the game. There’s a shared track on the main board which represents two ends of a scale. If you’re on the left of it at the Engineering end you get first dibs when it comes to choosing from the limited stations on offer to make your cars. You also get to use technologies which players other than you have researched, which is pretty awesome. You could even spend your own research points on moving someone else’s markers, just because you know you’ll have access to it.

The other end of that track is for Sales. The further to the right you are on it, the sooner you get to sell your Wacky Races cars to the unsuspecting public. Demand is limited, so getting the first chance to sell to the people who want the most expensive cars can be really important. A double-edged blade and no mistake. Do you make the most of everyone else’s research and build your own awesome KITT car from Knight Rider, but risk only being able to sell them for buttons? Saving and spending the Gantt charts (again, produced in yet another station) your factory makes is the only way to influence your order in the track. It’s easy to overlook how important this is, but you’ll only make that mistake once.

Fiddlier than fixing a faulty fuse on a faithful Ford Focus

Horseless Carriage has a staggering number of pieces. 92 cards might not sound like a lot, but couple that with the nearly 500 wooden pieces, and then add the 629 cardboard pieces that you’ll have to punch from 19(!) sheets of punchboard, and you get an idea of what I’m talking about. Just setting the game up to play means making stacks and stacks of station tiles, and when you get further in the later reaches of the game the market board will be swimming with little wooden cars. In addition to this your factory boards start to spread and swamp your own bit of space at the table.

When your factories get really complex towards the end of the game you need to be so careful to not bump the table, or let your clothes brush across it as you reach across the board for something. It’s all too easy to act like your own personal Godzilla and lay waste to all your hard work, destroying your factory’s layout. The station tiles just sit atop thin, card factory boards. There’s nothing to keep them in place. I’ve honestly taken photos later in the game just so I can use them to rebuild the factories in case they get moved.

The same is true of the market board. All those little wooden cars wouldn’t be an issue if it weren’t for the market windows. These are thin, really nicely made (by Splotter standards) plastic frames that you drop onto the market board to indicate where your customers will come from. They look great and do the job, but they’re difficult to manouevre and take back off the board without bumping and moving the cars, which are packed tight in the squares.

My final moan about all of this stuff is the spec boards. Each player has a wooden piece showing how far they’ve researched that thing, but with each new round one of these boards has to be moved away from the main board, and a replacement brought in. It’s too easy to bump one and send the pieces sliding, which again can be a real problem if you don’t know where everyone was on each board.

It’s all just an unnecessary distraction during a game which will already strain your mental aptitude to its limits.

Final thoughts

Horseless Carriage is a really tricky game for me to try to deliver a verdict on. I love a heavy, complicated game with interlocking gears and mechanisms, but at times this one almost feels like too much. The puzzle of filling the factory floor is really enjoyable, but tracing which thing connects to which other thing, making sure all the relevant tech markers are in the right place, and ascertaining what specs your finished cars have can be hard work. When you get it right, which takes time, it’s a deeply satisfying experience. When you get it wrong and realise you’ve stuffed up your chances of building anything decent until you get more factory boards in the following rounds, it can be really disheartening. That’s Splotter though, right? You know what you were getting into when you sat down to play.

The sheer amount of stuff in the box is just incredible. Good luck trying to get it all back in the box and have the lid shut flush. There are nowhere near enough baggies provided, which doesn’t help. I even ordered a set of trays to organise it from Cube4Me (who are excellent, by the way) and it’s still as ready to burst as my shirt buttons after Christmas dinner. If you want to play it before you buy, you can play an excellent version over on onlineboardgamers.com.

Horseless Carriage is a game which, with the right group of people, is an amazing experience. It’s heavy, it’s complex, there’s plenty of meta stuff happening with turn order and waiting to see who does what, and what’s left over, much like in Food Chain Magnate. Even after four plays I still don’t think I’ve scratched the surface of the strategy available in the game, but I can’t claim that as fact. It’s just the feeling I get from having seen how different each game has developed. The intro game where you all just build cars is a good way to learn, but it really comes to life when you add in the mainlines for trucks and sports cars too.

The part of the game which is the most fun is also the biggest deviation from the hard-fought, interactive nature of the game. Building your factory is cool, but it results in an intensely quiet period of the game where everyone has their head down, concentrating, and occasionally swearing under their breath. It’s not until everyone comes up for air and you see the results of all that planning and hard work that the interaction springs to life. Could that have been avoided? Probably not. It’s a game that takes the push and shove of FCM and throws in a geometric puzzle that’ll leave your brain in bits.

If you don’t enjoy heavy games, especially ones that’ll drag you over the coals the first couple of times you play, you won’t have a good time with Horseless Carriage. If you can invest the time and effort and have a group who dig that sort of thing too, you’ll be hard-pressed to find something better. A very clever game, an excellent game which asks its players to invest in it to truly appreciate it.

You can buy this game from my retail partner, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your account at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for a 5% discount on your first order of £60 or more.

Horseless Carriage (2023)

Design: Jeroen Doumen, Joris Wiersinga
Publisher: Splotter Spellen
Art: Jan Lipiński
Players: 3-5
Playing time: 180-240 mins

The post Horseless Carriage Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Rock, paper, charging horse

Take the Throne has a couple of core concepts that the game is built on.

Firstly, each House (player) in the game has an identical hand of five cards. If you’ve read my reviews in the past, you’ll know that I don’t like to deep-dive too much into exactly how a game is played, but you’ll just have to indulge me here, because this bit is important, and underpins the whole game. As a house player, three of the five cards in your hand work in a rock, paper, scissors style.

Anyone playing an Attack card is in contention for the throne, and the current throne holder chooses which will take it from them. Unless, that is, someone plays their Infiltrate card, which takes precedence over an Attack card. The other option is to play a Charge card, which beats Attack and Infiltrate, but only if there’s only a single Charge card played. If more than one player charges, they cancel each other out. The other cards – Feint and Sabotage – just allow you to swap your played card for another at the cost of 1 VP, and force someone else to change their played card, respectively.

A quiet ten minutes on the throne

The second concept is the idea that one player always has the throne. Being in control of the throne is how you’ll net the 8 VPs you need to win the game. When you hold the throne, you get a unique hand of cards to play with: the Crown deck. The Crown cards are completely different to those in the House decks and offer ways to either carve out more VPs or mess about with the other players’ cards.

The Defend card, for instance, means that all Attack cards played get discarded. Pretty cool on its own, but when you realise that Infiltrate cards depend on Attack cards being in play, it’s a double whammy. you’ll only lose the throne now if one player plays a Charge. Alternatively, you might choose to Abdicate and gain another VP, which sounds crazy, but if the House players cancel one another out and nobody claims the throne, you keep it.

The way the asymmetry works is such a nice twist on a game like Love Letter, for example, which is a game I love. Having asymmetry for only one player is something that’s not done that often. The Beast is a game which is a good example of this. To have one player trying to stay afloat while the others clamber over one another, desperate to pop their water wings, is something which gives this game a different feel to others you might already own.

Final thoughts

I had a sneaky feeling I’d like Take the Throne before I’d even played it. The description ticked so many boxes for me. I was right, too. I do like Take the Throne. It’s a great game that will almost certainly be stuffed into my bag for conventions and to start or end game nights with my group. It only takes one game to learn what each of the cards does, and how they interact with one another.

My only real problem is with player count. Take the Throne plays from three to five players, but I don’t enjoy it as much with three. Having only two House players means that the fun of some of the card play is lost. The Attack card is always beaten by Infiltrate and Charge, and Infiltrate is dependent on Attack being played, so why play Attack? I mean, there’s a bit more meta to it than that, but that’s the sort of thing that people say in their first few three-player games. I much prefer the game with four or five players, where it really shines. Multiple Charge cards that cancel one another are more likely, and watching the Throne player agonise over which Attack player gets the crown is great fun.

Take the Throne is one of those games like Coup, Love Letter, The Resistance, Citadels, etc. A small box, a small deck of cards, with the game itself played above the table, driven by the interactions between the players. These games live and die on their “Oh I can’t believe you did that!” moments, and Take the Throne delivers them by the bucketload. You’ll find your own meta develops in your group, and it changes depending on who you play with, and I love that. A cracking little game from another independent UK designer and publisher, and one I’m very happy to recommend.

Take the Throne launches on Gamefound right here in the summer and at a likely price of less than 20 quid, it’s a no-brainer if you ask me.

Take The Throne (2024)

Design: Jon Lanon
Publisher: Deathtrap Games
Art: Joszef Kovacs
Players: 3-5
Playing time: 5-15 mins

The post Take The Throne Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

If you’ve played other deduction games before, this might all sound familiar. Dishing out clues to help the rest of the table figure out the identities – ringing any bells? That’s right folks, Mysterium. Rear Window shares a lot of design DNA with Mysterium, but there are some small, but very important differences between the two.

“Well, that’s fine, Stella. Now would you fix me a sandwich please?”

The biggest difference between those two games is the goal of the game. In Mysterium, it’s always a cooperative game. All of the players win or lose together, so it’s always in everybody’s best interests to give good clues. In Rear Window, it’s usually the same. In order to win the Director needs the Watchers to correctly identify the four people involved, and their individual traits. To give them clues, they assign cards from their hand to the various windows on the board, hoping that the Watchers feed off the clues on each card you want them to notice, instead of the ones they invariably notice instead…

Earlier in this review though, you might have noticed the word ‘murder’, and if you’ve seen the film you’ll know that murder plays a big part. In the game adaptation the Watchers hand the Director 12 trait tiles and a murder tile. The tiles are shuffled and four of them are assigned – in secret, behind a screen – to each of the four apartments. You might think a 1-in-13 chance is low when it comes to drawing the murder tile, but the maths is more like 4-in-13, or closer to 1-in-3, so it happens quite often.

If and when a murder tile comes into play, the game is no longer cooperative. It’s now competitive. If the Watchers guess at least seven of the eight pieces of information, and guess where the murder happened, they win. For the Director to win when someone’s been offed, they have to make sure the Watchers guess at least six pieces of information and have them not guess where the murder happened. It’s a fine tightrope to tread.

It all goes to make Rear Window so tricky to play at first because as a Watcher, you have no idea whether a murder has happened. You’re working in good faith, you wonderful person you, because that’s all you have to go on at first. Figuring out whether there’s been a murder is tricky. Are the Director’s clues intentionally misleading so you don’t guess somebody’s done a bit of murdering, or are they just a bit crap at giving clues? Tricky…

“A murderer would never parade his crime in front of an open window.”

The other big departure from Mysterium is the art direction for the cards. Mysterium is like Dixit, in that the cards are often surreal, with colours and images which don’t normally belong together. In Rear Window, the cards all feature people and/or places from each apartment. You’ll see very specific people on the cards, matching the people you’re trying to guess. On the one hand, this is great. If you want to tell them Miss Torso is in apartment A, you can just put a card with her in that slot on the board. The difficulty comes when – as Director – you have a hand of cards which don’t feature the people you want to point to. What then?

This is where things get equally frustrating for the Director and the Watchers. You’ll play a card to a slot because you have to, so you’ll hope they guess other features on the card instead. Maybe the Director doesn’t want you to focus on the person, they’re more interested in the food in the background, trying to steer you toward guessing that person has the Gourmand trait. The Director can play a couple of cards each round face-down, which is great when you’re the Director and don’t want to give false clues, but it can also draw suspicion from the Watchers. “Is she playing that card face-down because maybe they’re the murderer, and she doesn’t want us to know?”.

It doesn’t take much to get suspicions roused, I can tell you that much.

Final thoughts

Let’s do the quick and easy bit first. If you like Mysterium, you’ll love Rear Window. The core gameplay is very much the same, but the addition of a semi-cooperative goal, and the never knowing which goal is in play until the end of the game, is awesome. I’ve played with some people who didn’t get on with it as well, but some of that I’m sure came down to the fact that on their very final action of the game, they felt like it was a toss-up between murder and one of three remaining traits. Repeated play is definitely rewarded, as is having a group who might enjoy this sort of game. It’s all about abstract communication, not strategy.

I really like the art direction in the game. It stays true to the feeling and style of the film, and it’s functional at the same time as being really nice. I don’t often make much of a fuss about the art in a game, but in the case of Rear Window the whole game revolves around the artwork, so it matters. We’ve seen a few film tie-ins over the last few years, but the majority of them feel more like a couple of smaller games bolted together. Top Gun with its mixture of a beach volleyball game combined with a dog-fighting one. Jaws with the Island side of the board before the big battle with the angry fish on the rear. Interestingly, both of those games also came from the design studio of Prospero Hall, but Rear Window feels more polished and more refined. It could have been made without the Rear Window name and theming and been just as good.

I’ve not mentioned a few of the other things in the box. For instance, the tiles that the Watchers can use to sneak looks at or replace face-down cards, or get the Director to add a pointer to a card to show which thing to focus on (or not, if you’re feeling particularly devious). There are additional trait tiles which let you add a second person to an apartment along with some kind of relationship between the occupants, just to really spice things up. Rear Window is a very, very good game, and as much as I hate it when Youtube channels make their “this game killed this other game” videos, I can’t see Mysterium getting much more play for me now. Rear Window is like Mysterium 1.5 and it’s great.

Review copy kindly provided by Funko Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Rear Window (2022)

Design: Prospero Hall
Publisher: Funko Games
Art: uncredited
Players: 3-5
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Rear Window Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Like, really excited.

Without delving too deeply into the historical roots, Brian Boru was the ruler of Ireland at around 1000AD. The game loosely follows the situation in Ireland at the time, with different clans vying for power, and those-who-would-be-rulers trying to unite the nation, fend off the Viking invasions, rebuild the religious buildings, and use arranged marriages to strengthen foreign bonds. How this happens in the game is with a mixture of trick-taking and area control, and it’s a blast.

Hello tarot

The first thing that struck me when I opened the box, was the tarot-size cards used in the game. Cards are so often a means to an end in games, but the added size – while being an impediment to small-handed shufflers – adds appropriate significance to their importance in the game. You see, every turn in the game is based around selecting a card in your hand (which you drafted during the drafting phase), and playing it in the current trick.

I’ve played plenty of trick-taking games in the past, and the concept is now mainstream thanks to games like The Crew, but the concept of combining it with area control is a new one to me. In a nutshell, the active player chooses a town on the map, and starts a trick in that town’s colour. The winner of the trick takes the action on the top of their played card, which is usually at least placing a marker of their colour on that town. The really interesting stuff happens in the cracks in-between, with the players who lost the trick.

Every card has two optional actions on the bottom, and players who lose the trick choose one to activate, in ascending numerical order. The order the actions are taken is really important, as some of the ways to score in the game are order-critical. Take the marriage track for example. You can move your token up the track, hoping to be the highest on it when the round ends, taking the hand of the bride-to-be. In contrast to a lot of games, places on the track cannot be shared. If you’re going to advance, you need enough steps to jump clear over the other would-be suitors. Playing earlier in turn order means it more difficult for those playing higher-ranked cards.

Trick or treat

Turn order often has a level of significance in a game, but I love just how important it is in Brian Boru. I also love the fact that the low-ranking cards in your hand don’t feel useless. Tricks feel a little different than in many games, as there’s no obligation to follow suit, or beat rank. Winning a trick is important, as it lets you claim the contested town, increasing your clan’s influence in that region, but losing a trick can be just as important. It’s a brilliant dichotomy which makes every turn feel significant.

It’s so rare that a game manages to keep every player rapt through every turn, but Brian Boru does just that. Nothing feels insignificant, and every other player’s turn is something you have to pay attention to, if you want to win. Winning a trick feels double-edged, like you’re missing out on something else, and the three areas you can influence are similar in this. If you’re the best at repelling Vikings, donating to the churches, or… getting married… you get big rewards at the end of the round, but your influence in each area gets reset, while everyone else keeps some.

Ultimately, it’s an area control game. The connections between towns on the map give you plenty to think about, because a common action is to spend five coins to expand into, and take control of, a connected town. Some of these connections cross region boundaries, some even traverse the sea, so careful placement of your discs is vital. It’s something that doesn’t really show its significance until the end of your first game, but you’ll get it soon enough.

Bumps in the road

It would be negligent of me to not talk about my biggest issue with the game, and that’s the rulebook. For the most part, the rulebook is fine. Turns are simple enough, the game’s concepts and mechanisms are easy to understand. The problems lie with the ambiguity in places, the things that aren’t fully explained. They don’t render the game bad, not by any means, but it can leave a slightly sour taste in the mouth for that first learning game.

My first game of Brian Boru was at AireCon, and we played a five-player game. At least three of us were very experienced gamers, and we couldn’t even start our first round, because the rules tell you to ‘play a card from your hand’ but don’t tell you whether that’s face-up or -down. In most games you’d assume face-up, but in a game where you don’t have to follow suit or rank, we couldn’t be sure. That’s just one example, but there were plenty of times we stopped to check the book, or the game’s BGG forums, for clarification. To save you the same hunting, there’s a great thread with collected corrections and clarifications here.

The biggest problem is for German players. In the intended game – the game in the English rulebook – each round consists of playing four of the cards in your hand, discarding the fifth. The German rulebook, and the player aids, all state that all five cards are played. That’s not a small error, that’s a different game. If you’re wondering why I mention the German game in my review, I have a good following of German friends on Twitter, and Germany accounts for my fourth-highest source of readers (vielen dank), so it’s worth saying.

Final thoughts

As I read this review back, I realise just how big a section I allocated for my grumbles. If a review was proportionally good vs bad paragraphs, you’d be forgiven for thinking I think Brian Boru is average, but it isn’t. Brian Boru is FANTASTIC. Yeah – bold, italicised, and underlined. It’s my favourite game of the year so far, and I can’t wait to play it again. My pre-middle-age grumbling is because when something is so good, anything that throws grit in the gears is exacerbated for me.

While you can play it with three players, I found it’s at its best with four or five. When I got back from AireCon, the first thing I did was find people to play a three-player game with, but it just lacked some of the bite and tension. It’s still good, very good in fact, it’s just not as good. There’s no such thing as a dead turn, and you can achieve something valuable with every card in your hand. Get four or five people around a table for an evening, and you’ll be talking about Brian Boru long after you’ve played it.

I love how engaged every player is, and how interactive the game is. Concentrating on your own plans will only get you so far, and it doesn’t take long to realise that. The rest of the game is in reading the players around the table, trying to work out their plans, what cards they might be holding, and what you can do to piss on their shamrocks. Peer Sylvester has done it again, and Osprey Games have another hit on their hands, I just hope a future printing revises the rulebook.

I get that this might not be everyone’s cup of tea, with the dry theme and area control, but I love it. It’s going to take something special to knock this off my top spot this year.

Review copy kindly provided by Osprey Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Brian Boru is available from our sponsor – Kienda. Sign-up using this link to get 5% off your first order over £60.

Brian Boru: High King of Ireland (2021)

Designer: Peer Sylvester
Publisher: Osprey Games
Art: Deirdre de Barra
Players: 3-5
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Brian Boru Review appeared first on Punchboard.

When it comes to railway games, many people immediately think of two different options. First, you’ve got the light-touch brilliance of one of the thousand versions of Ticket To Ride out there, and then you jump straight to the brain-melting, multi-hour domain of the 18xx games. Cube rail games fit somewhere in-between the two extremes. In them players usually invest in railway companies, à la 18xx games, but instead of laying hex tiles showing tracks, players put coloured cubes onto the board instead. There’s a fair bit of divergence in how the games play, but that basic structure is usually the same, and the stock market and investments are easier to handle.

Cubism

My first real exposure to the cube rail games was Ride The Rails, which I still really enjoy. I love how quickly the games play out, considering the amount of thinking, planning and improvisation needed. Being a bit a newbie still, I wondered just how different each game could feel, given that most of them share the same premise of investment, plonking cubes onto hexes, and making railways. Luzon Rails has gone a long way towards showing me that they can be different enough that I want to buy a lot more of these games now.

The first thing to mention about Luzon Rails is that it has an auction mechanism. Before the game, players bid against one another for shares in each of the railway companies. You might not think it matters which of the five companies you opt for, but right from the outset there are some really tricky decisions to make. The player who wins the first auction gets to choose which of the five starting spaces on the board they place their first rail cube, and all of your initial plans start from that first space.

Another thing to consider is that not all rail companies are made equally. The number of shares per company, varies. This all means that right from the get-go there’s a lot of playing the people around the table. Gauging what you think they might be trying to do, and where their plans for island domination start and end. I really enjoy these games where the game is so heavily informed by what the players are thinking. It’s not like Dominion, with its Big Money strategy. There’s no right or wrong to go about playing Luzon Rails, all that matters is how you do against your opponents.

Tickets please

Actions in Luzon Rails are triggered by cards. Each player has their own hand of cards, and there’s a bank of seven spaces at the bottom of the board, where a random selection of action cards are placed, face-up, for each round. On your turn you just have to play a card and carry out the action on it, which could be something like build more track, develop an area, auction a share etc. You choose if that card is one of the two you’re holding, or one of the seven at the bottom of the board. You really need to keep your attention on who’s holding how many cards, and how many are on the bottom of the board, because once that seventh card gets played, the round ends. No warning, no ‘one last turn’, it’s straight on to paying dividends and setting up the next round.

I really like this mechanism. I know there are some railway game fans out there who don’t like the idea of the randomness of cards, and prefer to play with perfect knowledge of what’s going on on the table, but I’ve got to say, I really like it. There’s a terrific tension when there’s only one card left on the board, with shifting eyes trying to gauge who’s going to play it, and who’s going to manage to complete another route before the end of the round and the pay-out. Do you try for one more development for yourself, or trigger the end so someone else can’t?

It can be a little frustrating if the cards you get dealt don’t line up with your plans, because the cards you need might be in the shared pool and at the mercy of other players before you. But that’s just how this game works, and I like it. This style of game can be dominated if you’ve got a player with a very analytical mind, or a lot of experience, and the randomness that the cards introduce can help level the playing field a little. Not always, as everyone’s subject to the same chance, but it’s a nice twist.

Final thoughts

I might not be a cube rails expert, but I know what I like, and I like Luzon Rails. There are some really nice touches in the way the game plays. For example, the dice that track the dividend values can have their values increased by adding track to a production city. That number on the die becomes the value that each jump in dividend value increases by, when you build track in a port city. So it’s possible to build a compact, but really profitable network. Alternatively, if someone is racing away with the lead, there’s nothing to stop you buying shares in their railway and building a track to nowhere in the mountains. Just saying…

The rules are really easy to learn, and the game plays out nice and quickly. You’re probably looking at around an hour for four players to play from start to end. I really like how the game is set in the Philippines too. it struck me as an unusual place to set a game, but I like it. Something about it feels slightly exotic. Philippine artist Jesse Cabasan did a great job of that most difficult of tasks – making a hex-based train game look pretty.

If you like your train games to have no luck at all, look to one of the other cube rails games. Maybe something like Iberian Gauge might suit you better. But if you’re looking for something with more player interaction and a bit more bite than Ride The Rails, and if you just love that hot auction action, I think you’ll really get a kick out of Luzon Rails. It’s cube rails, but with its own distinct flavour, and the game balance is really good. Robin spent a lot of time refining the scoring and interactions, and it really shows. The game’s available to by through Gamefound for €30 right now, which is a fair price, given the huge board. I really like this game, and it’s another that’s going to stay on my slowly-growing cube rails shelf.

Review copy kindly provided by Robin David. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Luzon Rails (2021)

Designer: Robin David
Publisher: Self-published
Art: Jessi Cabasan, Tiffany Moon
Players: 3-5 (solo mode included)
Playing time: 45-85 mins

The post Luzon Rails Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The designer is listed as a Harry Wu, and if it’s not a name you recognise, that’s because it’s a pseudonym belonging to John Bohrer. John is a famous train game designer, who even has some of the 18xx games with his name on. Accompanying the streamlined design is more beautiful artwork and graphic design from one of my favourites, Ian O’Toole. This small box game packs in a huge board, a load of little white passenger meeples, and a freight car’s worth of tiny, coloured trains. It’s cuteness overload and the pieces are impossible not to play with.

Making tracks

The rules for playing Ride The Rails are so simple that they fit onto a double-sided sheet of A4 paper. At the start of your turn you choose which train company (colour) you want to take a share in, and add it to your player board. Then players take turns adding trains to the hex map, only placing trains in colours they hold shares in. The trains represent tracks, or routes. The aim is to connect the various cities dotted all over the continental US map on the board. In every city there’s a passenger, and at the end of each round each player chooses a passenger, follows the routes around the map, and removes them. Easy so far.

You get money for each city the passenger visits, and the shareholders also get money if their colour routes are used. The more shares you hold in a company, the bigger the pay-out you get from your dividends. This leads to some really interesting decisions that you need to make. Is it really worth moving that passenger all the way to the other side of the map, if your competitors are going to rake in big bucks because you used their routes?

You really need your wits about you, because you’re working with a limited number of trains of each colour. If you’re the only person laying that colour track, that’s not so much of a problem, but if others are using the same colour, you need to think about whether it’s worth striking out toward a new city, if it’s unlikely there’ll be enough trains to finish the route. A new colour becomes available in each round, which makes this a game of balancing strategy, while reacting to the other players’ choices.

Tickets please

The way the map develops in Ride The Rails is really satisfying. The first couple of colours available can only start in the Eastern-most cities, and as the game advances, the routes start to snake West, like ivy growing along a wall. Each round can see some really big swings in VPs, which keeps the game alive and interesting from the first turn to the last. One particularly clever route can move things in your favour, and investing in shares in the company the leader is using, can force them to make some really tricky choices.

In the first couple of rounds your choices are really limited as to what you can do, and where you’re going to build. When you combine that with the knowledge that some companies only become available for the last two or three rounds, it feels like a straight-forward game. When you reach the late-game stages though, Ride The Rails just springs to life and gets so competitive, so tight, and so interesting. Your passenger choices become a double-edged blade, because there’s no way your choice won’t benefit at least one other player at the same time as you. The trick comes in figuring out how to maximise your own profits, but not at the expense of boosting someone way ahead of yourself.

Full steam ahead

The brilliance of Ride The Rails comes from its speed and simplicity. You can play a five player game in an hour, which is not something you can say about the majority of the 18xx games. In fairness, it’s not a great comparison, because in truth this is nothing like 1830, for example. The only real similarities are in the fact it’s a train game, and there’s investment in companies, but that’s where it ends. It’s a great way to get that Train Game hit in a short time, with rules that you could teach to anyone. A turn is simple: choose a colour to invest in, lay seven or eight trains on the board, move a passenger.

Like many good games, simple actions don’t always mean easy choices. There’s this brilliant cat & mouse feel when two players are both laying trains of the same colours, taking turns. Trying to second guess what they have planned, and where they might link up with other colours is half the fun. Then you have the fun of deciding whether you want to back that horse and invest in their colours, or scupper them by using up their trains in a different direction. It’s a game with no real direct interaction, but an absolute ton of passive interactions.

Final thoughts

I’ll be the first to admit, I have a really limited exposure to train games. It’s just Ticket To Ride in all its various guises mostly. When the package arrived from Capstone, I shared some pictures of the game and mentioned that I’d seen it referred to as ’18xx-lite’. Hoo boy, what a mistake. It turns out that 18xx fans are very invested in their games, and don’t take kindly to bad comparisons. Having taught myself 1830 since, and realising how true this complaint was, made me appreciate just how different the games are. This gave me added motivation to make sure that I a) learned the (numerous) differences, and b) did this game justice in its own right.

I really like Ride The Rails. John Bohrer is a divisive designer for some people, but make no mistake, he knows his way around a train game. It’s so easy to learn, and so fast to play, the only word to describe it is ‘elegant’. It’s a refreshing change to play a meaty, thinky game, but for it to be so simple in its execution. I can take this game to a game night knowing that I could teach a table of people how to play in a few minutes, play an entire game with a group of happy people, and still have time for another big game. That’s worth a lot to me.

Ride The Rails has sparked a newfound interest for me, with Cube Rails games firmly on my radar. I can’t wait to get my hands on the other Iron Rail games – Irish Gauge and Iberian Gauge. The pastel colours and sleek design go towards making a really beautiful game, and turns what could have been beige hexes and wooden cubes, into something absolutely gorgeous to play with. It’s a great game with three players, but at its best with four or five, so that’s a consideration to make before buying. But for £30, this is an easy recommendation for me to make. Ride the Rails is a great game.

Review copy kindly provided by Capstone Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Ride The Rails (2020)

Designer: Harry Wu
Publisher: Capstone Games
Art: Ian O’Toole
Players: 3-5
Playing time: 45-60 mins

The post Ride The Rails Review appeared first on Punchboard.