F$%^ Crayon Train Games

Crayon Train Games

This will incorporate NorAm rails, Eurorails et al.  The mechanics will be talked about in general since that stays the same from game to game while the game play will talk about some specific titles.

Objective:  This is not a game about victory points.  This is a race to $250 and a city connection threshold.

Mechanics:

 Everyone starts with $50 or $70 depending on if you are playing the long or short version.  With that you build track.  Base cost is $1 for building into a plain, $2 for a mountain, $5 for a rugged mountain (alp), $3 for a small or medium city or $5 for a major city.  This is further modified by building bridges.  Crossing a river adds +2 to the cost and a lake/ocean inlet costs +3.    After the initial track buy, all further track must be connected to your network.  You can use opponents track at $3/turn rental.

Your train has a movement.  It starts at 9 but can be upgraded to 12.  Each mile post/link connection is one move.

There is a large deck of cards with contracts.  Each card has 3 selections.   (kind of hard to see on the picture…but it’s the fan on top.)  Each window tells you what you need deliver, where to deliver it, and how much money you get.   You can only complete one contract per card, and once filling it you discard it drawing a replacement.  At this time events may happen like derailments or storms or whatever.  There are instructions for each one of them in the rules so consider having those handy.

Instead of moving, you may discard all your contracts and draw 3 new ones.  Events occur normally.

First one to get to $250 and all but one major city connection wins!

Tactics:  I am only intimately familiar with Eurorails, so that game will have specifics and I will generalize where I can.

1)      Get high value cargo runs going as soon as possible.  Spain is absolutely the best for this, it has great runs to and fro.  Italy is a great supplier but the demands stinks.   England has great demand but the supply stinks.

2)      Ferries are evil.  Sometimes they are a necessary evil, but in general all they do is slow you down.

3)      Think long term when laying down your initial track.  You will probably criss-cross the initial buy sever times so avoiding a city for a $3 savings just makes longer turns down the road.

Review:  these games used to be AWESOME before the explosion of designer board games.  Now it shows its age.  The long versions can take 6+ hours and that is just something I am not interesting in doing ever again.  The games also vary wildly in game play.  Eurorails is well balanced with contacts going all over the map, and NorAm rails is pretty good too.  Japan rails and British rails get dominated by Tokyo and London rendering those games uninteresting.   I think I have railed on the production quality of games in a tube before, so just summarizing, Mayfair get a clue.  If the game is well put together I am definitely willing to spend $20 more.

So my gaming group still has a copy of Eurorails and we bust it out once or twice a year to play the short version.  Within those limitations it still holds up pretty well.  It messes with the game balance (Spain becomes even more important because contracts to central Europe are now reachable with initial cash) but that’s a small price to play to be finished in 2 hours.