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.

I guess you could call it – engine-building!

Loco-motivate

I first time I saw Isle of Trains (I can’t be bothered to keep writing ‘All Aboard’ on the end. I’m very lazy) was at this year’s UK Games Expo, where I managed to confuse it with Osprey Games’ new title, Village Rails, because I’m special. The original Isle of Trains came out eight years ago, but I haven’t played it, so I won’t be making a comparison. The one thing I can tell you, based on a sneaky peek at the BGG page for the original, is that I prefer the newer, more realistic artwork on the trains.

The concept of Isle of Trains is simple: make the best darned train you can. Your train carries goods and peoples around the island, fulfilling contracts and delivering passengers. When I say your train goes around the island, it never actually moves anywhere, other than in your mind. You see, what you’re actually doing is creating a kind of tableau of trainy bits in front of you, adding tankers and freight cars and what have you, to carry the goods and fare-dodging miscreants.

The super-interesting thing that Isle of Trains does, is to make you want to build locomotives that are attractive to the other players too. Coveting thy neighbours caboose, if you like. If you load your goods onto an opponent’s train, you get a bonus – yay! At the same time, however, you’ve just helped them get closer to fulfilling a contract – boo! If this last paragraph has you rubbing your chin and thinking “Hmm, interesting, you have my attention”, then read on.

Even if it didn’t, read on anyway. It’s polite.

Choo-choose your track

As if I’d make it through the whole review without a choo-choose quip. Isle of Trains is deceptively simple. The iconography is clear (albeit quite small), and learning how to upgrade or extend your train only takes a quick explanation. What it does brilliantly, is to force you to make awkward decisions on every turn you take. Add more, new carriages, or upgrade the ones you already have? Jack of all trades, or become the oil baron of the island? Either is viable, but which will work for you?

You can play without loading things onto any train other than your own, but it doesn’t really work. The joy of the not-forced-but-strongly-suggested interactions between players is so much fun. It brings the game up out of the navel-gazing isolation of a heads-down Euro, and ensures that everyone around the table knows what their rivals are up to. There are only a handful of locations for contracts and passengers to be turned-in, so the competition in the game is turned up to 11 the whole time.

Thanks to the big deck of train cards, there’s a lot of variety in the way games pan out, and the same is true of contracts and passengers. The randomised (and thankfully, very quick) setup means it’s impossible to go into the game with a plan. The game setup and your initial hand of cards will start to mould a strategy from the pliable clay you call a brain. Even the cards that make-up the island itself are double-sided. The whole game is a fantastic example of game design done well.

Final thoughts

I fell in love with Isle of Trains: All Aboard as soon as I played a couple of turns at UKGE. It’s so simple to play, and to teach, that you’d expect it to be about as deep as a paddling pool. But it isn’t. You’re forced to make awkward choices constantly, and I love it. It’s a brilliant game.

I’m used to the concept of “using someone else’s thing for mutual benefit”. It’s been present in classics like Caylus and Lords of Waterdeep for a long time. In those games, however, there’s a level of abstraction in the benefits. You know you’re helping your rival in some small way, but it’s difficult to see how it figures in their plans. In Isle of Trains, you know exactly what you’re helping them with, but those bonuses are too good to ignore. They may as well be buffet cars offering me free sausage rolls – I just can’t help myself.

Three players is the sweet spot. I’ve played with two, which was fun, but the head-to-head duel means you can easily just aim to complete the contracts the other person is ignoring. Four is decent, but feels a little more chaotic. Three through – *chef’s kiss*. The Kickstarter campaign is live as you read this, and while the folks at Dranda Games haven’t asked me to, I’m going to strongly suggest you back it. How many Kickstarters can you back at £19? Not many, that’s for sure, and with the deluxe version just a few quid more, Isle of Trains: All Aboard is a steal.

Preview copy kindly provided by Dranda Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Isle of Trains: All Aboard (2022)

Designers: Seth Jaffee, Dan Keltner
Publisher: Dranda Games
Art: Denis Martynets
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Isle of Trains: All Aboard Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

So, how do you create a game about shares and investment, but keep it simple? The best way to do it is to keep the actions simple. If you make the gameplay simple, it leaves your brain free to churn away at a strategy, and that’s precisely what designer (and artist, the clever chap) Mark Gerrits has done with Mini Express. It’s essentially a cube rail game, similar to others I’ve covered here, like Luzon Rails and Ride the Rails.

First class

Your turn in Mini Express is limited to doing one of two things. The main thing you’ll be doing is adding tracks to the map, by taking some (incredibly cute!) wooden trains from the relevant company’s supply, and plopping them onto the hexes between two cities, extending their railway track. Once you’ve done that, you move that company’s track length marker along its track. Longer tracks are worth more points at the end of the game.

The other action is taking a share. It’s another simple action: you take a share certificate from the company’s supply, decrease your level of influence in that company by the number of trains in their supply, then add three more trains to that supply.

That’s it, that’s all you can do in Mini Express. Doesn’t sound too daunting now, does it? It also doesn’t sound that exciting, or interesting, when I break the game down like that. The truth, however, is that this game is very good, and very tense. All of the excitement in the game is generated by the four different colours used, and the interactions between tracks and companies.

Brain training

In Mini Express there are four goods types – cotton, timber, metal and leather (or maybe skins, they’re never actually named in the rules). They correlate to white, brown, grey and orange colours, which just so happen to be the same colours as the companies you’re investing in, and the tracks laid on the map. There’s a weird dichotomy whereby it feels like it should be really easy to understand how they all relate to one another, but in truth it feels oddly confusing in your first game or two.

The longer the track in a particular colour, the more points each share is potentially worth at the end of the game. Each time you connect a track to a new city, you take the token from the city, which in turn increases your level of influence with the companies whose colours are on the token. Are you still with me?

The person who ends up with the most influence in each company gets a number of victory points shown on the track length chart, multiplied by the number of shares you have in that company. If what you’re taking away from this garbled explanation, is that you want to have shares and influence in the companies with the longest tracks, you’re correct. It just feels much more difficult to explain that with the game set up in front of you, which is a weird feeling.

Buffet car

Once you get your head around what you’re trying to do in Mini Express, the game comes alive. Much like choosing a sandwich on the buffet car on a train, there’s a lot to sink your teeth into, but bad decisions can leave you feeling sick. You start out with concrete plans for the game ahead, which some git will shatter like a pneumatic drill, by claiming a connecting city you really wanted. You’ll find your loyalty to lines and colours changing as the game goes on, and it’s the player who most carefully treads these shifting sands who will do well.

Despite only having two actions to choose from, you’ll find yourself agonising over decisions nearly every turn. There’s this brilliant mechanism which means to take a share in a company, you have to give-up influence in that company, to the tune of the number of trains left in their supply. It means you don’t want to take shares if there are too many trains left, but in the same breath, if you lay track using all of the remaining trains in a colour, the next person is left to pickup a free share.

Mini Express has a ton of interactivity, but no real ‘take that!’ mechanism, which I really like. Some games suit direct attacks between players, but not train games. Making a malicious move just to deny someone is a possibility, but it’s highly unlikely, as it benefits nobody. I love that the end-of-game trigger is very visible, which leads to some very exciting last few turns, waiting to see who’s going to end the pursuit of railway riches.

Final thoughts

The more cube rail games I play, the more appreciation I have for the design nuances the designers use. Just like in Ride The Rails, Mini Express has simple, quick turns, and revolves around putting trains on hexes to make tracks. The two games feel very different, in spite of their genetic similarities. Mini Express has a lot more going on, and is a more difficult game to get to grips with. It’s a brilliant game.

The components are outstanding, but I do have a minor complaint about the screen-printed trains. The grey trains have white printing, while the white have grey printing. It can make them confusing when you’re trying to look at routes on the board. There’s a really simple solution though, just lay them face-down.

The solo mode plays a decent game, but it’s no substitute for three to five players. With more than two playing, there’s a terrific feeling of competition. There are some great variants for both the USA and Europe maps (the map board is double-sided!) which throw in some more things to think about, should you get tired of the standard game. Mini express is great. The way it combines simple actions with difficult decisions is utterly compulsive. If you like cube rail games, or are looking for an entry point to the sub-genre, look no further.

Review copy kindly provided by Moaideas Game Design. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

The new expansion map packs and deluxe upgrades for Mini Express go live on Kickstarter in early July. Sign up here to be notified when it launches.

Mini Express (2021)

Designer: Mark Gerrits
Publisher: Moaiseas Game Design
Art: Pinting Pan, Shogun, Desnet Amane, Chiyami
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Mini Express 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.