Game of Trains

Product Information

You can protect a card, which is slipped under one of your cards to protect it from the first action’s card abilities. Actions include things like swapping cards in the lineup, moving cards in the lineup, forcing every player to discard a specific card in their lineup, or protecting a card from discard.

Don’t get tunnel vision though – you’ll want to keep an eye on what your opponents are doing in case you need to derail their plans, or to make sure you don’t discard a card with an ability on it that they may be able to use to win, or whether you need to discard a card that has a matching ability to one already on the table to remove a card they might have wanted to use (see, I told you there was a little more thinking to it! From laying down rails, expanding into rivers and mountains, to building stations and even putting down a rail with another person, you gain a Waste card, giving you nothing but an extra card of nothing. You can either take a card from the deck and replace any existing carriage with the one you have just drawn, or you can use the ability of one of the face up cards next to the draw pile. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. My son who’s big into “action” games like Sentinels of the Multiverse, thought Trains was going to be boring.Even though there are several potential actions available in the deck, they are all simple to understand. 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).

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. I may have made a few premature judgements when I saw the box size and read through the rules, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much this game had me planning and plotting once we played it. Isle of Trains: All Aboard is a card-based engine building game where cards have multiple uses: You can use cards as locomotives, freight cars, passenger cars, or buildings to improve the effectiveness and abilities of your train. The rest of the cards are placed in a draw pile with some placed face-up to be used for their special abilities. 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.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. There are also some awesome pop culture nods thrown in on some of the cards that I didn’t even notice the first time we played. It can feel limiting in the fact that if you don’t want to use an available ability, your only other option is a random card drawn from the deck that must be placed somewhere in your line. This game has subtle enough strategies that I think it would appeal to “Strategy Gamers” and “Avid Gamers”. Again, ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ is a novel and not an academic or nonfiction text containing indexes, notes, or works cited.

In fact, the true power behind the game is the fact that it comes with a board along with 500 cards and a few components. While prior experience with deck-builders will grease the wheels, Trains is extremely easy to pick up. Should you skip a turn, you can banish any waste cards in your hand back into the waste deck, cleansing your deck until you clog it up again with more waste. resources lay in wait in the box, and at random, eight are pulled out to form a unique market each time you play. Meaning that there’s nothing special about the card abilities or game play that are unique to trains.

The tokens used for rails and stations — colored cubes and colorless hexagonal cylinders, respectively — are not terribly representative, but they are simple and easily distinguishable. I am a little miffed that all the engines are the same, they could have different artwork just to give it a little bit variety. Protect can be placed under the leftmost, rightmost, or center card in your line to be unaffected by the Remove ability on that card. Some abilities allow you to switch cars in your train; some allow you to make all players (including you) replace one car in each own train with a random card from the deck; one ability allow you to gain protection from such random replacement.

Three players is not a problem and a good sweet spot for interacting with each other and playing time. 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. Sometimes this might involve playing suboptimally just to keep another player from getting that swap card they desperately need. 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 the sort of game that begins training montages glaring at pictures of Dominion stuck to its mirror. These force every player to discard a specified carriage and replace it with one from the draw pile.