Do you enjoy cheese? I don't - won't touch it unless it's on a pizza or lasagna - but I did enjoy this game, which involved moving a lot of cheese from the cows of Wensleydale to the eager consumers of England. Well, the consumer in Wigan, at least.

Randy isn't from Wigan - he's from Canada, originally, although now a resident in Ballarat, Australia - but he's been getting quite a few Wallace games of late. This was our first game of Last Train To Wensleydale, and here he is, taking the shrinkwrap off:



Set-up for this game was somewhat fiddly: we had to place a lot of counters on the board, then remove the cheese or stone counters that didn't match the areas they were in. It provides a random element for the game so it's replayable, but there is some set-up to do. Not as much as some other games, though!

On the map, you can see passengers who want to go east (green), passengers who want to go south (red) and people who don't want you going anywhere and certainly don't want you building bypasses or rail lines through their property, thank you! (white). Alas, the opposer figures aren't dressed in dressing gowns.

You can also see stone cubes (white) and cheese cubes (orange).

The first part of the game was bidding to gain influence on the four tracks that are frightfully important in the game: you need influence in the government to get the jump on your competitors when building track as well as getting rid of those pesky opposers; you need influence with the engine-makers so you can get some cheap second-hand stock to run on your rails; and influence with the two major (non-playing) rail companies so you can connect to their rails and then sell them your lines when you've sucked all the profit out of them.



From there, it was a short jump to building our railways, buying available stock, and finally shipping the cubes. Passengers need to connect to the non-player rail matching their colour (or a station thereof), stone and cheese just needs to be shipped off the board. Stone is the most valuable (2), everything else is 1. After that, you pay the costs of your railway on the board and adjust your income. All of us did pretty well at getting a positive income for our first turn. I had an income of 1 pound!

Merric: blue, Randy: purple, Rich: black, Josh: yellow

The final stage of the turn saw us get the non-playing "big" companies to take over our lines by expending some influence with them (1 influence for every two links). Josh and Rich didn't do so (the former because he didn't have the influence left!) whilst Randy and I replaced all but one of our tracks.

The next turn saw me connect up my first line to the southern railways as well; it was expensive moving through the valleys, but it was worth it as I was able to deliver a lot of passengers and cubes. Randy headed out south into cheeseland, whilst Josh moved into the valleys with a very long railwayline. Rich had been blocked by my move (I had the favour of the government) and headed up north.



The next turn saw me blocking off Rich again - not intentionally, but that's how it went - as I built a long line up onto the edge of the northern valleys. It was, in fact, my cheese run, although I got a few stones and passengers as well. I was hurt by having very little pull with the train manufacturers, but I managed to come out of it ok. Josh and Randy moved further into the valleys, whilst Rich went into the valleys with a little help from the track Randy had sold. Incomewise, Rich was hurt badly and slipped into the negatives, whilst Randy, Josh and I stayed pretty solvent.

Rich, wondering at why Merric is always interfering with his plans!

The final stage of the game saw Randy make a major tactical blunder as he sold off all of his track, thus allowing Josh to easily connect to it and thus deliver all the red passengers that otherwise couldn't have been delivered. Randy had no government influence to speak of, and was going last - the one-two blow of this misjudgment was something he wouldn't be able to recover from, and his final shipping was poor indeed.

Meanwhile, I moved up into the valley I'd monopolized early in the game and took stone and passengers out into the greater world. Josh did very well in this last turn, whilst Rich recovered some income: not enough to make his net value positive, and certainly not enough to make his score competitive, but enough to save some face.



Now came the final scoring. Scoring in Wensleydale is one point for every good delivered, plus an additional 2 points for each set of four you have (green & red passengers, cheese and stone goods). My entire game had been leading up to that point, as I'd balanced it as well as I could - I'd also delivered more, but that was just gravy. Then income and remaining track was taken into account (you don't want to still have track!) and the scoring went like this:

Merric: 36 points (25 goods, 8 from sets, 5 from income, -2 from track)
Josh: 30 points (23 goods, 6 from sets, 4 from income -3 from track)
Randy: 26 points (19 goods, 2 from sets, 5 from income, 0 track)
Rich: 17 points (19 goods, 6 from sets, -5 from income, -3 from track)

I'd won the game easily - and took much delight from beating Randy by that margin - but our next game will likely be much harder for me to outwit Randy in.

I find Last Train To Wensleydale to be an enjoyable design; much more so than Tinner's Trail, which I feels suffers from a massive dose of randomness. It's unlikely to replace the other Wallace train games in my affection (I have so many variants of Age of Steam now...), but it can stand slightly to the side as its own enjoyable design.

The game took us about two hours, including set-up and learning the rules as we went - and first game analysis paralysis. I'd expect the game to be in the order of 60-90 minutes with experienced players. Any rules mistakes are Randy's fault, even if I was the one explaining them. His game, his fault!