I recently developed a little obsession with buying a game about trains, and after some deliberation, i decided to pick up on the underground rather than ticket to ride, transamerica, metro, or any other rail game. I played the game once with some regular gaming budies and one newcomer, and these are my thoughts.

Your Turn: The game is pretty simple, either turn you either lay track or give up laying track to get a branch token. You can lay 4 pieces of track, or take up to 4 branch tokens, or any combination thereof as long as the total number of "actions" is 4. Track sections must be laid in a continuous linear fashion, unless you spend two branch tokens, which will let you lay a track that BRANCHES off of an existing line. After laying track, you move the passanger to one or two destinations (depending on the destination types available), you replenish the visible destinations, and then the next player goes.

Scoring: points are scored for interacting with on-board elements, such as connecting to certain stations, or connecting matched pairs of random markers that are placed on set stations at the beginning of the game. You also score points for surrounding stations with a loop, and for having the passenger travel on your line. The passanger travels to destinations determined by random draws from a destination deck, and he always chooses the route which involves the least walking, and in case of a tie, the least walking and the fewest number of lines.

Game end: After the destination deck is depleted, you finish out the round laying track only, and then the player with the highest score wins.

Thoughts: I think this game does a pretty good job of giving you a number of objectives and making you decide on whats important. Since you can see where the passanger will go at the end of the turn, you have to balance your temptation to affect his choice of line with your moves, to lay track to score on preset board elements, and to make lines that seem logical for the whole length of the game rather than just the current turn. The random placement of some on-board scoring opportunities, combined with limited space to lay track in some areas, and the random travel of the passanger will keep the game from getting too repetitive.

The presentation of the game is nice, with a beautiful mounted board, nice wooden pieces, and decent art.

My only beef with the game is that the downtime inbetween turns is a bit long, espescially if youre playing with somebody who takes forever to decide what theyre going to do. Also, while there is some player interaction injected in the game due to the limited space to lay track on some areas of the board, the affect of your moves on other players in the game is somewhat minimal.

Conclusions: If youre looking for a rail game that is quick to learn, and pretty fun to play, check out On The Underground.