A Brief History

I have a rather large game collection. Too large, by some estimates, but that is another topic. The point is this: I do not have a large collection of train-based games. I have played several, from the old crayon-rail games to more modern offerings. I like a few of them, find others to be tedious. I guess what I am trying to say is that this is not a theme I seek out.

Before I started writing for Meeple Mountain, I was (and remain) a fan. One of the first things I ever experienced on the site was an unboxing of Empyreal: Spells and Steam. This video (and the others that followed) introduced me to the core game, the expansion, and the deluxe edition upgrade. I went from that unboxing video to ordering the whole kit-and-kaboodle!

So let's take a look at this fantasy world train game, set in the early industrial-age and see what we have here, shall we?

[caption id="attachment_306878" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The box is almost a foot to a side, and nearly 9-inches deep. This is not a small package.[/caption]

Spells and Steam

In Empyreal: Spells and Steam, you have a magic-filled fantasy world that is just entering that glorious period…

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When it comes to roll-and-writes, my gold standard is still The Guild of Merchant Explorers (yes, I know it’s not technically a roll-and-write). I think this is primarily because I like maps, and if I’m going to puzzle solitaire style with folks, I like having a little map dotted with features and accomplishments at the end.

I also love public transit, and subway maps are just about the coolest looking map you can get this side of your municipality. Next Station: Tokyo, does a great job being what it intends to be — a subway coloring book that you can relax with.

This is my first review of a game as a solo player. I did not play this game with other players, and because the only thing that really changes is more people in the room with you, I think that’s fine in this case. For review purposes, I actually just played the game four-handed, because I wanted to try the puzzle from several angles.

But, if you’re familiar with the flip-and-write variant of the roll-and-write, you’ll be right at home here. There are four subway lines, each represented by a different colored pencil. When you’ve got that pencil, you’re working on that line (for example, purple)…

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All Aboard!

It’s the late 1800’s. Up to five fledgling railroad companies are all vying to be the first to complete routes across the country and scoop up valuable real estate. Throughout twelve sessions, the game map will slowly unfurl before you, revealing new mechanics, cities, and new tickets and routes to claim. Power will shift between individual sessions, with certain players claiming temporary power and decision-making based on performance, while last place gets a small boon for the next game to boost their odds.

I’ve played close to a dozen legacy-style games over the last decade or so, and my experiences have ranged from thrilling and immersive experiences to games that never really grabbed hold of my group and got permanently shelved after a few sessions. Designer Rob Daviau is the father of the modern legacy game, kickstarting the craze with Risk Legacy back in 2011, and his modus operandi seems to be taking modern classics and tossing a fresh coat of legacy paint on them. For the most part, it has been a successful formula.

But… Ticket to Ride? Legacy? The mixture just didn’t sit right in my head. I’m admittedly not the biggest fan of the base game (though I will play the Europe variant if given the opportunity), but the idea of mashing up such…

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The thing I struggle with most when playing 18xx games over and over again? I love the system, the private companies, the merger opportunities, the operational interaction, and sometimes even the financial shenanigans. But the maps are static.

What if I could find a game that used an 18xx framework but is played on a modular map? That’s something I would throw my money at in a heartbeat.

Last fall, I found the crowdfunding campaign for Railways of the Lost Atlas, an 18xx game created by first-time designers Kevin Delger and Jacob Schacht of Asterisk Games. One look at the campaign page told me this was serious, and after throwing my money at these guys, my initial promise was rewarded with one of the most communicative fulfillment processes I have ever seen.

While I usually have to wait years and not months to get my copies of crowdfunded games, something weird happened: the game showed up on time, about nine months later. I had the chance to play Railways of the Lost Atlas at the 18xx gaming convention TraXX earlier this year, and after adding my two plays at TraXX to two more plays since my personal copy arrived, I have to say—

Bravo. Bravo, Asterisk, for rewarding our faith in your process. For keeping us abreast…

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For the first time in my 18xx career (which began about two years ago with a play of 1861: Railways of the Russian Empire), I found myself looking through the rulebook, playing games online, and then doing an in-person play only to still find myself realizing a sad truth.

I had no idea what I should be doing to win.

Yes, even with other 18xx games, I read the rules and had a sense of what I should be doing. Playing the games helped bring winning strategies to life and I always left the table having a better sense of what I should, and should not, have done during each game.

Now that I’ve played 25 different 18xx games, as well as lots of different stock manipulation and/or non-18xx train games such as Iberian Gauge, City of the Big Shoulders, Chicago Express, and others, I have a unique perspective on 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties—

It is not for me. That’s not because the design isn’t eye-opening, well balanced, or unique…gosh, 1862 is, without question, the most unique experience of the 18xx games I have tried. But I can’t grasp even basic strategy with this one, a minor frustration that became major by the sixth time I played it online before trying this in person.

1862…

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The American Old West, the Western Frontier, the Wild West.

Known by many names, this time of American expansion—its trials and tribulations, its people, and the inevitable conflicts that arose between those people—has long been a backdrop of popular culture. Even as events were transpiring, newspapers and, later, telegrams carried the news far and wide for anyone wanting to hear it. The allure of the West inspired creatives, in the period, of all kinds: writers, artists, musicians, and even filmmakers (the very first Western was an 1899 British film called ‘Kidnapping By Indians’). And, even though the West isn’t so wild anymore and, even though it’s long been thoroughly explored, its allure still calls to us today, even if you aren’t from America. Just take a look at Pioneer Rails. 

Designed by Jeffrey D. Allers (Germany) and Matthew Dunstan (Australia), Pioneer Rails plops its players directly into the middle of the westward expansion. In Pioneer Rails, the players are railroad owners competing to create the best railroads using nothing but some pencils, a pad of paper, and some playing cards.

Game Flow

As you may have surmised, Pioneer Rails is a flip and fill game. At the beginning of the game, each player is given a pencil and a play sheet from the pad. Then, a starting player is…

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As a relative newbie to the 18xx space, it’s been fun to hear from a variety of different people about the supposedly “best” way to introduce the system to new players.

18Chesapeake is one that comes up a lot. In my experience, 18Chesapeake fails at this mainly because the game’s opening draft and initial rounds of play are sometimes a bit stumbly and bankruptcy is fairly common. Worse, bidding on a private company that then doesn’t align with a specific strategy—which really gets painful when you realize that as a new player, you don’t have a specific strategy—can really put you in a hole.

1846: The Race for the Midwest is a game that I think works well as an introduction to the system, in part because it is friendly towards new players. Its main stumbling block for new players is the idea of “partial capitalization.” In this format (similar to 18xx-adjacent Euros like City of the Big Shoulders), investors can start a major corporation by plunking down 20% of the funds needed to “float” the company, as opposed to full capitalization.

Full capitalization is how the majority of 18xx games fund railroad companies. Usually, one player (or a variety of investors) finance 40-60% of a firm’s initial public offering to start operations. If a par is…

The post 18MS: The Railroads Come to Mississippi Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I am relatively certain that I have never uttered the following phrase, but I absolutely adore the box bottoms of both On the Underground titles. Inside the shrink, LudiCreations included a paper print of the standard fare: barcode, description, picture of the board, etc. But my heart smiled—twice—when the glossy stock fell away, revealing a partner image to the box top. The London top is paired with a Berlin bottom. Likewise, the Paris lid features a New York bottom. The silhouetted watercolor style is the same, creating six-sided beauty.

My second realization upon opening the two boxes—for they arrived together—was that each box contained roughly 60% wasted space. This, perhaps unexpectedly, also made me smile because I realized that a fan of the games could combine the two titles in one box (with mixed and matched box parts) with room to spare. One man’s waste is another man’s opportunity, I suppose. 

[caption id="attachment_300742" align="alignnone" width="1024"] ...with room, and a box, to spare.[/caption]

As for the physical contents, London / Berlin and Paris / New York are approximately identical: a behemoth, two-sided, six-fold map board, baggies of sticks representing tracks, a handful of cardboard tokens, a few site markers, and, of course, the Traveler. The one notable difference is the absence of…

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“It’s like Ticket to Ride meets Get On Board meets Caesar’s Empire,” I said to our friends as we sat down to their first play of On the Underground. 

I enjoy all three of those titles on one level or another.

The game

On the Underground: London / Berlin dropped in 2019 as a reimplementation of the 2006 original, which was titled without reference to its London locale. The box design is clean and attractive, with splashes of watercolor creating a recognizable London skyline. In a break from convention, the box bottom is the Berlin edition of the graphic, a second cover.

The map is enormous, a two-sided, six-fold behemoth of squares the size of the box. The map holds to that clean, splashed aesthetic, littered with brush-stroked lines connecting various points around the city, which are either plain gray, yellow, or some variety of special. Kudos to LudiCreations for making this thing appealing. Despite the sheer number of dots about, the board is not at all claustrophobic. Some of the brushed lines are doubled and tripled, indicating the possibility of multiple lines passing through.

Players work their way through a deck of locations, using their line colors to create continuous paths around the city in…

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At SPIEL 2023, I had the chance to meet with one of my favorite publishers, Horrible Guild. They have never done me wrong, with games like Quicksand, Dungeon Fighter, Evergreen, and The Great Split getting rave reviews from our team as well as my personal network.

During that meeting, our marketing contact was kind enough to provide a copy of the newest expansion to the Railroad Ink franchise, Archipelago. These new player boards represent four islands, drawn as 4x4 grids that are separated by bridges in a format that is four times the size of the map in the original game, in terms of physical footprint.

The rules of the base game haven’t changed. Anyone at the table can roll the Route dice, and the result must be drawn by all players on one of the four islands on spaces that connect previously drawn track/highway or start from one of the arrows around the spaces of the Archipelago map. However, a couple new additions add spice to the proceedings by triggering scores for drawing through certain spaces (like Houses, which score end game points) and the use of a Warehouse, which lets players save Routes for use later in the game.

Archipelago is compatible with “most” Railroad Ink expansions, according to the…

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Trains and board games. Peanut butter and jelly. High living costs and Canada. Me and bad jokes. For whatever divine reason, these subjects cannot be separated. What’s quite interesting about train board games is they are often associated with complexity and mind melting sessions. Here comes Isle of Trains: All Aboard to show the world that you can have some train conductor fun with a deck of cards in only an hour of your time. With a concept like this, you can see why this one wrangled more than a few pairs of eyeballs.

The story driving this one is quite barebones. There is an island where train conductors throughout the world attend a competition to see who is the best. This involves delivering passengers, fulfilling cargo contracts, and showing off your sweet ride that rewards you with victory points. Think of it as the Isle of Man TT except replace motorcycles with trains and without a body count.

Since this is a card game, it’s time I talk a bit about them. Isle of Trains: All Aboard is one of the few card games that consists almost entirely of multi-use cards. For those who don’t know the terminology, it means that cards can be used in a variety of ways, depending on the context. In Isle…

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My 18xx journey continues!

During my visit to SPIEL last fall, I spent a few minutes with Leonhard “Lonny” Orgler, the owner of publisher Lonny Games and the designer of train game classics such as 1880: China, 1848: Australia, and Russian Railroads. During that conversation, Lonny was kind enough to furnish a copy of 18Mag: Hungarian Railway History for review.

I’m seven plays into my 18Mag journey, and I will give it this much: this is the most unique of the 18xx titles I’ve tried so far thanks to a couple major changes to the system. I don’t think all these changes work, but for those who are looking to shake things up a bit, 18Mag delivers a satisfying experience. Also, this is the only 18xx game I own that has a solo mode!

Minors, Not a Setback

18Mag is a 1-6 player economic tile-laying game based on the 18xx system created by Francis Tresham that began with the game 1829, released more than 40 years ago. For more details on how games in the 18xx system typically play, please read my kickoff article, 18xx: A Beginner’s Journey. There’s also a growing pool of content on the 18xx format that walks a new player…

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Back in 2020 I swooned over Village Green, a delightfully constricting game of card placement and fluid scoring designed by Peer Sylvester and published by Osprey Games. 

Fast forward to 2023 and Osprey are back with Village Rails, designed by Matthew Dunstan and Brett J. Gilbert. It’s a sequel, of sorts. Like its sibling, Village Rails provides players with the puzzley experience of creating a grid of symbol-splattered cards with scoring cards around the edge, all wrapped up in a tidy and tiny package.

It’s good: compelling, compact and cranium-caressing. Worthy of the ‘Village’ name. And yet the experience it provides is markedly different and whilst I like it quite a bit, there is no swoon.

All aboard

The goal of Village Rails is points, tracked on gorgeous scoring dials shaped like old-fashioned train tickets. They’re a delightful highlight of an excellent production.

On each of your turns you take a ‘tracks’ card and add it to your expanding 3 x 4 grid. These cards have two train tracks traversing them, with a track entering or leaving each of the card’s sides. By the end of the game you have…

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