What a tangled web we weave

Over the course of a game, you’re going to make seven railway lines with twelve cards. No more, no less. The little cardboard frame gives you your starting points along the top and left sides, and with each turn, you choose a card from the market and add it to your display. They can go anywhere adjacent to an edge or an existing card, which gives you plenty of scope to plan as they criss-cross and snake their way around your tableau. The track cards have a terrain type (e.g. village, field, wetland) which comes into play when you score them, so I should probably talk about scoring, as it’s where all of the fun and interesting decisions stem from.

Every time you complete a track – i.e. have a complete track from a border to an edge – you first score the points as you move along the track. Take a little trip with me on the Punchboard Express.

Choo-choo – “Look, it’s a signal. We can count those and then refer to the scoring table to get some points” – chuff, chuff, chuff, chuff – “Aha, a tractor! Each of those scores me points for the number of different terrains I go through”.

You get the idea. Icons on the track earn you points, but only when you play them in the right places. There’s the potential for more points, however, as the track cards are double-sided, and on the reverse there are trips. If you buy trip cards from the trip market you can place one or two next to a track, and earn bonus points. For instance, you could have a trip card that lets you score two of the tractors on that line a second time each. Great news if you’ve got tractors on that line, not so great if you don’t.

You might have noticed that I talked about buying trip cards, and paying for things is an important part of the game. You need money, lest Village Rails’ conductor make his way down the train and kick you off for pretending to sleep instead of buying a ticket.

Tickets, please

Village Rails harkens back to the golden age of steam. As such, the numbers we’re talking about when it comes to cold, hard cash are small. You start with five pounds sterling, and trip cards cost just three of them. When you take a card from the market which isn’t at the end of the row, you place a pound on each card before the one you want. Money is tight though, and there are only two ways to gain any kind of income. You claim the coins on any card you take where someone before you bought their way along the market, but you’ll usually only see a quid or two this way. The main way is using Terminus cards.

Every time you complete a line you have to play a Terminus card at the same time, and each Terminus card has a table to show you how much money you made from the passengers on that trip. The money you earn is calculated in a similar way to scoring points on tracks, where you’re rewarded for things like the number of signals along it, or the number of fields it passes through. It’s a really clever system which means that longer tracks earn you more points, but if you don’t finish tracks you don’t have the money to buy more trips or choose better cards in the market.

What a pickle.

Final thoughts

I make no secret of the fact that I’m a big fan of Matthew Dunstan’s games. From the print and play games from Postmark Games through to The Guild of Merchant Explorers (which I reviewed here), which also featured the co-design talent of Brett Gilbert, just like Village Rails. He’s got an uncanny talent for taking the string of what should be an easy concept and teasing the individual threads out of it to pull you in different directions. Village Rails is no exception.

If you’re looking at it and thinking that it looks a bit like a Button Shy game, I’d agree with you. At a glance you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a title in their -opolis line of games, like Sprawlopolis. It shares some of the feelings of those games too, where the choice of not only where, but also which way around you place your card is really important. You’ll catch yourself focusing on making one mighty line of meandering countryside perfection at the expense of other lines which end up being a couple of miles around a corner through a field, but you won’t care. Your rail network, your little swathe of England’s green and pleasant land, is uniquely yours.

There’s very little interaction to speak of. You might take a card someone else wants, but it’s not a game where you’d ever do it because someone else wants it. In a game where you only get twelve turns and twelve cards in your tableau, using one of them just to spite an opponent would be a big waste. If you’re happy to just build your own little patch of the countryside while other people are doing the same though, Village Rails really is excellent. It comes in a dinky little box, has almost no setup time, and plays out in less than an hour with four players. For less than £20, it’s a very easy recommendation for me to make. There are even little scoring dials that look like train tickets!

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

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.

Village Rails (2022)

Design: Matthew Dunstan, Brett J. Gilbert
Publisher: Osprey Games
Art: Joanna Rosa
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Village Rails Review appeared first on Punchboard.

How do you annoy Lady Gaga?

Pioneer Rails is another flip-and-write which offers you loads of things to do, knowing full well that you can’t possibly do all of them. Your railways start out in one of the four quarters of the map, with each associated with a suit from a standard deck of cards. When you pick one of the three cards on offer, the suit of that card lets you extend that railway by three lines. Different hexes give different benefits if they have a feature, and each has a number. The number tells you how many edges of the hex you need to draw around, so while a mine only takes one edge to get you some gold, banking that gold at a… well, a bank. A bank that needs four edges of a bank surrounded. Plotting routes to get all the stuff you want is tricky, because temptation lies along the edge of every hex.

I mentioned poker hands earlier, and that’s one of my favourite parts of Pioneer Rails. The cards on offer each round represent the 10 – Ace range of standard playing cards. When you choose a card for its suit, to grow your rail networks, you also write the card’s value in the little row of boxes at the bottom of the sheet. The goal of these boxes is to create poker hands, which are worth points during each of the interim scoring phases. It’s a really interesting twist to most flip-and-writes, and it makes the choice of which card to take each round extra tricky. It’s also a really thematic touch, which brings to mind a hundred different westerns with grizzled cowboys playing poker in saloons.

If at first you don’t succeed

I don’t get as much time to play games as I’d like. While a lot of that is down to having a family and a full-time job, I also have the self-imposed pressure of having a backlog of games to write about. Sometimes that means that no sooner have I finished playing a game, than I’m packing it up, unboxing another and learning that one. Pioneer Rails scuppered that workstream by having an abundance of that ‘one more game’ pull. I find myself going back to try another strategy or another combination of things. It’s got the same draw for me as the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet at a Premier Inn. High praise indeed!

By far the trickiest concept to grasp in the game is the way Cattle Ranches work. You score them by isolating them in such a way that you can trace a contiguous line of hexes to another ranch, with rails, mountains and rivers acting as barriers. It sounds really easy when you see it written like that, but there’s an odd mental disconnect when it comes to working it out. I think it’s partially to do with the fact that your focus during the game is on drawing lines between the hexes to accomplish everything, but to score the ranches you’re looking at the hexes, rather than the gaps. It’s not a major issue, and it’s one that may be a non-issue by the time it goes to print. This is just to let you know, if you do struggle with it, you’re not alone, and after a single play, you’ll have it.

Final thoughts

The hardest thing when it comes to reviewing verb-and-write games is conveying what makes them so much fun. I could span this review out to 2,000 words explaining every last action and intricacy, but that would be doing it a disservice. A game so quick and easy to both learn and play deserves a review of equal brevity and function. The feeling of ownership that every little line you draw bestows on your sheet is fantastic. The little rail networks are yours and yours alone, and despite a very small set of variables in terms of which actions you take on your turn, every player’s sheet will end up very different to the others.

If you’ve played any of the Postmark Games catalogue in the past, especially Voyages, you’ll immediately recognise Matt’s hand in the design of Pioneer Rails. It doesn’t feel like a rip-off at all, just a feeling a familiarity which goes in its favour, as Voyages is awesome. The artwork and presentation throughout is great, thanks to Inkgolem’s brushstrokes. The sheets are bright and colourful, and the playing cards are especially gorgeous. I believe there’s going to be a bonus in the Kickstarter campaign to get a full set of playing cards in the same style, and I’d be inclined to make sure I have them. That’s not Dranda asking me to push them, I just think they’re beautiful.

Pioneer Rails will have a pledge for the two different map sheets, and mini-expansions, for £24. For this price, for a game as much fun as Pioneer Rails is, I think you’d have to try hard to think of a reason to not back it. It’s fun, fast, and easy to learn. Admittedly the train part of it feels very abstracted – you only ever draw lines – but it doesn’t matter. Grab a pack of strong felt-tip pens, tip your stetson, and get your Old West railway on. Great stuff, flip-and-write fans rejoice, you’re going to love it! The Kickstarter campaign begins on the 17th April 2023.

Preview copy kindly provided by Dranda Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own. All rules, artwork and components subject to change.

Pioneer Rails (2023)

Designers: Jeffrey D. Allers, Matthew Dunstan
Publisher: Dranda Games
Art: Javier Inkgolem
Players: 1-100
Playing time: 30-45 mins

The post Pioneer Rails Preview appeared first on Punchboard.