Game of Trains

Product Information

It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. The card which is replaced is put in the middle of the table, which could be used as an optional action. Its lack of options and depth mean it won’t be for everyone but with a small, portable footprint and rules that are easy to teach it works really well with a variety of groups and there is enough strategy (and lovely artwork) here to keep me enjoying it for a while. These force every player to discard a specified carriage and replace it with one from the draw pile. At the end of the game, it is revealed that the final station is a Nazi concentration camp, and that the players had been participating in the Holocaust.

A deckbuilder at heart, it gives players the opportunity to build a network of delays through a hand of trains and rails. Both of these elements can really diminish the playability of your hand, so you really need to consider the cost of your actions. Trains is AEG’s English-language release of the Japanese game of the same name which debuted at Essen 2012. They are a central part of Trains’ game mechanics: you can hold your Waste, manage it with other bought cards, or skip a turn to purge all Waste from your hand back to the Waste deck.At the end of the game, you can actually see that you accomplished something by looking over your network. So far, the only problem, I’ve seen is counteracting people who solely focus on cycling through their deck and hardly build up their railroad network. Maybe somewhere out there is a variant that you have to collect the same type of carriages, but of course that will add way too much randomness and complexly to it. You can play 3 games of Trains without using a randomized card twice, and still have 6 cards you’ve never used! Some of the game’s juiciest decisions come from having a hand that allows expansion but trying to get the most out of your resources.

Unlike Dominion’s approach that has you sitting on a runaway engine of victory point generation, Trains lets you build an engine, then bogs it down – as everything you do on the boards throws waste cards into your deck. I do like how my play area looks with the train and carriages and you could almost just tell a story about what your engine is pulling, in your head that is.

In fact, throughout the game the players kept making comparisons between Trains cards and Dominion cards. Another thing the game gives you to think about, if you can take in that much information, is that the card you are discarding in the middle might be a huge advantage for another player. We’ve also found the games we play the most in our family are those where we don’t have to refresh ourselves on the rules every time we pull it out. In typical deck-builder fashion you begin with a hand of five cards, expend those cards, draw a fresh five and play continues clockwise around the table.

Regardless, you definitely won’t mind the gap between your turns – there is very little downtime in Game of Trains. They do nothing but stink up your deck and potentially clog up your hand, providing no aid to your networking antics. It’s one I intend to keep in my bag for family gatherings, when conversation is more important than concentration. The only time you directly interfere with someone else’s line is with those ‘remove a card’ special effects, though being able to use those lock abilities to counter this is also pretty fun!Le matériel est comme les règles de ce jeu, assez simple mais c'est le genre de jeu avec des mécaniques simples et diaboliques comme je les aime. You can also use your money in conjunction with your Lay Rails cards to put railway track (in the form of colored cube markers) onto different terrain types on a hex board map (in the base game, maps of either Tokyo or Osaka). The most complicated cards in the deck, and the ones to cause the most annoyance amongst your friends, are the discard cards.