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.

You’re on a shuttle, heading from Ganymede (one of Jupiter’s moons) to one of the moons of a red dwarf called Demeter. You’re heading there because they’re extremely similar to Earth, and as luck would have it, they’ve discovered dinosaurs on one of the moons.

Dinosaurs. In. Space.

I could leave the review there and be pretty happy, to be honest. As luck would have it though, Demeter is a great game.

Welcome, to Jove-assic Park

For all this talk of space, it’s dinosaurs all the way from hereon in. Every round of the game sees one card from all five decks flipped face-up, and all players choose which one they want to use. The top half of a card tells you to colour something in, be that a box or a bit of a dinosaur (more on that in a bit), and the bottom half lets you choose one of the tracks to advance on.

If you’ve ever played a something-and-write game with a little bit of depth to it, you can probably already guess that there’s no way you can manage to do everything in one game. Upgrading the blue track, for example, means that each time you take a scientist action, you get an additional action point for each of the blue boxes you’ve coloured. If you don’t want to min-max, you can go for a bit of everything, and get rewarded by completing columns in the tracks, which give you different bonuses.

Much like Hadrian’s Wall, my favourite flip and write ever, (read the review here, it’s great), your first ten, twenty, or even thirty plays of Demeter can be treated like a sandbox. You can try a different strategy every time you play, and that’s where half the fun comes from. The other half comes from the fact that you’re COLOURING-IN DINOSAURS. I can’t over-emphasise how important this tiny, ridiculous detail is to me. If you take my advice, you’ll get a set of colouring pencils to make your dinos completely awesome.

Getting started

The hardest part of Demeter is teaching the game to people. There’s a bit of theme there, and the tracks kinda tie together, but it’s still a bit loose. It’s not so loose as to be totally abstract, like Ganz Schön Clever (review here), but not intuitive either. Let’s take the blue and red actions as an example.

Blue actions are scientists, and red are for viewing platforms. You need to build enough viewing platforms for each dinosaur area, to allow you to colour-in the scientists in those areas. If you think about it, the idea of better viewing platforms allowing more scientists to to more study makes sense, but it’s very difficult to convey in terms of the game’s mechanisms.

When you play the game, all of that theme goes out the window anyway, and you’re just playing with the various cogs and gears the game drops in front of you, it just means that the first teach can be a bit cumbersome. There’s a lot going on, and a lot of options. Understanding the dependencies between the coloured actions is important. All of that said, I taught my ten-year-old to play it, and once he got the idea, he was well away. It’s just something worth bearing in mind, as it can sour that first exposure for non-gamers.

Autumn & Winter Expansion

The Autumn & Winter expansion for Demeter adds a few new dino tiles, and two new pads to play on. They don’t change the game massively, but they do mix things up in ways that feel fresh if you’ve burned-out on the base game.

Autumn is largely the same as the base game of Demeter, with a couple of important differences. The research track at the top of your sheet now has three starting points instead of one, so you can heavily weigh your research actions towards a particular bonus tile, without having to use a lot of actions to snake your way through to them. The other main differences are the ways that some of the dinosaur species are scored. Changes to things like the Pterodactyl and Gallimimus are enough to make you rethink the way you approach the game.

The most interesting new thing that Autumn brings are the replacement dinosaur tiles, which now have the names of the species on, and a whole new breed that you need for Winter.

Winter changes more about the game than Autumn does. First up, you can now research Stegosaurus, which is great for dinosaur fans, because more dinos is always better – fact. The other big difference is in the action cards used for the game. In a standard game, just 12 of the 15 cards from each deck are used, and you never know which are excluded. In Winter, all 15 cards are used in the game, meaning every card will be available, and there are another three full rounds. Great news if you always find yourself saying “Oh come one, one more turn!”.

Coupled with those changes, there are some new upgrades available, and more changes to the research track.

Interestingly the Autumn & Winter expansion also comes with a few bonus tiles for Demeter’s sister game, Varuna.

Final thoughts

I know I had a bit of a grumble about how the teach can be a bit awkward, but it’s really the only negative I can lay at Demeter’s feet. If you’ve played a modern roll-and-write game, like Fleet: The Dice Game, you know what to expect. Pick one of a load of options, try to combo it as best you can with the other things on your sheet, and have fun doing it.

Demeter is fun, it’s satisfying, and it’s quick. Like, the-game-is-over-in-20-minutes quick. It’s got enough substance to keep any regular gamer happy for a long time, and novices enjoy the feeling of learning how combos work too. It’s just a tidy, fun package. The Autumn & Winter Expansion is great if you enjoy the base game. It’s more of the same, with a bit of nuance. Autumn, to me, feels like the game Demeter was meant to be all along, almost as if Demeter was hurried out before a final blast of playtesting. Winter builds on the base game, and it’s the ‘advanced’ version of Demeter.

The thing I love about Demeter – other than the whole “dinosaurs in space” thing – is that it doesn’t take itself seriously at all. It shares a universe with other games like Varuna and Ganymede, but it really plays towards that family fun and ‘great big kid’ angle. My son loves colouring the dinosaurs as much as I do, and as someone who has his nose in the rulebooks of a lot of heavy Euro and wargames, it’s a refreshing change for me. If you like roll-and-writes, give it a go, you’ll have a ton of fun.

You can buy both Demeter and the Autumn & Winter expansion from Punchboard’s retail friend, Kienda. Remember to sign up for your account through kienda.co.uk/punchboard for a potential 5% saving on your first purchase.

If you enjoyed this review and would like to read more like this, consider supporting the site by joining my monthly membership at Kofi. It starts from £1 per month, offers member benefits, and lets me know you’re enjoying what I’m doing.

Demeter (2020)

Designer: Matthieu Verdier
Publisher: Sorry We Are French
Art: Oliver Mootoo, David Sitbon
Players: 1-100
Playing time: 15 mins

Demeter: Autumn & Winter

Designer: Matthieu Verdier
Publisher: Sorry We Are French
Art: David Sitbon
Players: 1-50
Playing time: 20-30 mins

The post Demeter + Autumn & Winter Expansion Review appeared first on Punchboard.