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Who's the more foolish? The fool or fool that plays after the fool?
United States
DURHAM
North Carolina
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I have written before about my plays of Railways of the World: The Card Game, a game I picked up partly because of the "what Ticket to Ride card game should have been" comments on BGG but also because it was the right weight and theme for my train-mad son to play. At that level it was a big success.
However, I was also interested in trying out with the adults. The single play with just my wife was not so much of a success, though the games we played 4-player were pretty fun and diverting, with the main interest lying in messing with each other for control of each of the cities, while also trying to build up a network and deliver sets of goods. And as a diverting 45 minute game it was all well and good, but you were quite at the mercy of the cards you got, despite the 'pick one of three' Ticket to Ride style card draw and the opportunity to take from the discard pile. Too often, the things there were the stuff no one wanted. Blind draws were the most taken action.
So it a fine game but lacked that something extra to make it ... special.
Well, after my initial posts (which were often promptly answered by one of the co-designers Steve Ellis) I was actually contacted by the other half of this dynamic duo James Eastham, with an offer to send me the expansion. I didn't take much persuading, but the prospect of improved game play was appealing in any case.
The expansion is just a deck of cards. It adds enough track and cities to support up to 5 (though you need to find a set of 12 trains as their pieces for yourself). More importantly for my mind were the introduction of several new cards and a new way to play.
The idea of these were that each player would have a Baron, a set of tunnels and a switch along with their hand of cards. The switch allows you to change the color of the track you are laying midway, meaning you can attach a city to a point where it would normally not be allowed to go. The tunnels allow you to link two cities already in play together (and there are some nice effects that has on the direction and tempo of the game). Finally, the Barons introduce a secret agenda to your play, scoring end-of-game bonus points for fulfilling certain conditions, such as delivering yellow cubes or connecting to red cities. Each type of card expands the options you have for your play and changes up your incentives to collect certain track or build cities in particular places. They don't really address the card draw aspect though.
After our first games, talking over the luck of the draw, people commented that the cards tended to play you, you took what you drew and made that part of your plan - tactical opportunism rather than a more strategic vision. We talked about expanding the cards on offer, even of stealing the swiping rule from either Ticket to Ride (in that game, when 3 engines are displayed, the cards are flushed and refilled) or from Thurn & Taxis (where you can opt to flush the display cards at a cost of an action). The alteration that the expansion offers is another approach entirely - they suggest forming 3 separate draw stacks for each of the 3 types of card (cities, track and engines), with track more available (2 draws per turn) and both cities and engines giving only one card per turn. When we tried this out, it really did alleviate most of the card draw frustration (though you still may have to search hard to get the right color track!) and allowed you to get cities when you needed them. However, there was a sense that there was something a little bit missing and my wife pinpointed it - we missed the sneaky draw of an engine (usable as both wild track and to improve your range for deliveries) from the face down stack. So in fact, we adapted the written version to a 2 deck system, with the cities forming one pile and the track and engines in the other. You could still take a single engine if it was face-up, but if you top-decked one, it was yours and you could draw again.
We didn't really get to use the switch, but I see their potential use. The tunnels I should talk about, as I was really confused about how they worked. I am usually the rule book reader for the house but my wife took it off me then patiently taught me how it worked. I had each tunnel in the middle of a set of cards, linked directly between 2 nearby cities: CITY---T--CITY. How it actually works is much more elegant and neater too: the tunnels come in pairs (the key thing I missed) and you play both at once, each coming out of the respective cities being linked. This opens up a potential route for deliveries and also uses up two of your trains in the process, affecting the tempo. Indeed, my wife ended our game by playing her tunnel and last two trains, shutting me out of the points for one city. It was a clever move!
The Barons are also interesting but again we adapted how they are played. I like how the expansion sets out these different toys and invites you to mix and match. You can play Barons as being drawn from a central pool (so you can pick up a Baron during the game). Alternately, you get dealt two and keep one. We initially played it by this second rule, but changed it shortly into the game, as you have almost no information to base that initial discard decision on. So we changed it and dealt two out but kept them both. Then at the end of the game you could choose which one you wanted to play for end-of-game scoring. I liked this much better, giving the player an adaptable position and giving them an extra thing to think about - keep going for red cubes or expanding the engines you have to take that objective.
Overall, this has raised my opinion of the Railways card game. I'm looking forward to get some more plays in (and teaching the new ways to play to my group).
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