Game of Trains

Product Information

The cards in Trains don’t ever get as complex as some of the cards from Dominion expansions, but they still make for a fun, fast paced deckbuilder. Tempo can also be important to control – since some players may not opt for the quick start and try to get a decent engine going first before hitting the board. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. They contain a logical symbol-based system which keeps most of the cards from appearing cluttered, and the graphic design draws the eye to the 3 parts of the card relevant to gameplay: cost (money necessary to purchase the card), value (money the card gives you when played) and card type/effect (what action you may take on the board). Many cards have both a purchasing figure and an action or effect – these cards may be used for both purposes when played.

There’s always some downtime during trips where pulling out a light card game is great to play while sitting around chatting. You can also try to control the action pool by replacing a card with an action matching what’s in the pool, which discards them both. The board itself won me over because it’s another way to not only gain victory points but to feel like your laying down rails on the board. You win by scoring the most points, which you earn by building up your train, completing contracts, and delivering passengers.Each turn player can do one of the following: take a random card from the deck or use definite ability of the card which was removed from any train earlier. 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. To win the aim is for a player to have 7 carriage cards arranged, from the engine, lowest to highest, at the end of his turn. Players start out with the same basic deck of 10 cards and a common pool of cards available for sale by all. The common of pool of cards have a set of standard cards that are always in the game and another set of cards that are randomly drawn at setup.

Cards can also be spent to pay for the construction of your new train cars and buildings, or you can use your cards as cargo and load them onto available freight cars. I’m not exaggerating though, the box for this game is very small – It definitely won’t take up a lot of precious shelf real estate in your collection.

As Gabrielle Zevin publicly stated in last year’s ‘Wired’ interview, Brenda Romero’s undistributed board game, ‘Train,’ which Zevin has never played but was aware of, served as one point of inspiration among many for the novel, including books, plays, video games, visual art and locales. Then it becomes a race – with the players who got the early victory point lead trying to end the game before the heavy engine can overtake them. You can draw a card from the deck and replace one of your cards in your train line with the one you draw. However, each game not only holds the regular market of train and rails resources, but a market of eight randomly generated components.

It’s pretty unusual for the base box of a deck-builder to allow two games without a repeated card in play – Trains gives you nearly four! There are just a few rules, which can be taught to adults in two minutes or less, and the flow of the game is very casual. Four players, you will need good table space and possibly will be waiting for your turn quite a bit, as people can tend to want to see everything going on.

Destructoid praised the game's nuance and mechanics, noting that it makes effective use of the board game format: "The Auschwitz revelation is but one aspect of an entire experience designed to make players question the way they follow rules, and how they’ll behave once they understand what’s going on, and how complicit they’re willing to be. Having two maps to choose from adds some variability to the game, but they’re not different enough to change the way you’ll play. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The most common point of confusion among new players was the use of the universal recycling symbol (arrows in a triangle) to represent taking a Waste card, but it was not a barrier to play. 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.