Railroad Tycoon Board Game

[Efraine Ton]

GameboardAn absolutely enormous map of the United States. It's a full 45"x36". The board is actually divided into 3, two-panel pieces. The board size is a pretty good match for the tiles and the miniatures. Everything has plenty of space on the board without being crowded. Some folks may find the size of the board quite daunting, but it did fit on my dining room table (with leaf inserted) and it did fit on a long foldout table at a friend's house (with just a bit of overhang on the edges. However, if you're sitting at the top or bottom of the map you might have to wander to the other side to really see how your holdings are doing.

The map depicts the Eastern United States, with various cities marked in specific colors, and the land generally divided between clear and mountainous terrain, with river running through the plains and ridges running through the mountains. The rivers were a bit hard to work with because they don't actually run along hex sides. Instead they follow what I presume are their more authentic courses.

First the board tends to warp upward on the edges. This was noticible, but neglible, in my copy of a game. I put a clip between two segments in my second game solely to keep the round track level, but it wasn't a big deal. It could be a bigger problem in higher humidity areas than California.

Second, the blue cities are printed too purple on the board. They're actually very distinctive from the purple cities, but it can be an issue if you're seeing a blue city on its own. I think most players made this blue/purple mistake at least once in each game.

Tiles: Players lay their track by putting down track tiles: straights, curves, or crossovers, in one of the two terrain types (clear or mountainous). The tiles are all full-colored and linen-textured. They're also all double-sided, which is great, but the fronts and the backs were somewhat random rather than being related to each other, which is less great.. As a result there was plenty of each piece, but they were sometimes hard to find. One of our players noted that he particularly liked the attention that had been paid to details in the artwork on the tracks.

Miniatures: There are twenty-five trains in each of the six player colors (red, blue, green, yellow, purple, and black). In addition there are twenty-four brown "empty city" markers which depict water towers, coal towers, round houses, and railroad stops.

Share Certificates: These linen-textured cardstock certificates feel almost like vinyl and are another of the very attractive components in this game. They each simply show a share count (1, 5, or 10) and the money earned for those shares ($5,000 per). We never had a use for the "10" denominations in either game I played.

The Railroad Operation cards offer various goals and bonuses. Good use has been made of icons to show when a card can be used. (They're also similar or identical to the icons used in Eagle's Conquest of the Empire, which is a nice bit of continuity.) The cards feature period artwork and text explaining the cards. The text is pretty clear, but entirely impossible to read from across the very large board. Some iconography would have made these cards easier to use.

Rules: The 12-page full-color rulebook is full of illustrations and examples. It dose a good job of explaining the game and also has some nice bits on strategy and history. There's a nice summary of actions and track costs on the back of the rules, but we never used it because all that info is helpfully listed on the board as well.

Overall, Railroad Tycoon is a beautifully produced, high-quality game. The game is gigantic, so be prepared for that, however. There are some minor production problems and some minor usability problems, but the game still earns a full "5" out of "5" for Style.

Setup: The players must find a table large enough to set the board on. The board is then laid out and initial goods are put on the board. Each city is marked with a number between 1 and 6, and that many goods in random colors (blue, purple, black, yellow, red) are placed in that city.

Each player chooses a color and takes the trains in that color. Each player also draws a Railroad Tycoon card, which will give him a secret goal for the game (e.g., least shares issued, most money at the end, etc). Finally, each player also takes a "1" engine card.

The Board. The board depicts the Eastern half of the United States. There is plain terrain, sometimes with rivers, and mountains, sometimes with ridges. There are numerous cities on the board. Some are colored the same colors as the goods (blue, purple, black, yellow, red), while others are gray, which is uncolored.

Railroad Operations Cards. There are a number of different Railroad Operation cards. Some of these are goal cards, which give bonus points to the first players to do certain things (most frequently link up two cities or deliver goods to a specific city). Other cards can give players immediate benefits (e.g., an extra turn), later benefits (e.g., build track for free on a future turn), or continuous benefits (e.g., build 5 track once a turn; or earn a point whenever someone delivers goosd to a specific city).

Money. Note that no money is given out at the start of the game. Whenever players need money they must issue shares in their company. Each share earns a player $5,000. However, each one also has some deficits. $1,000 in dividends must be paid on each share every single turn and they're also worth -1 point each at the end of the game. However, players will need to issue shares to win the game: usually at least a couple and at most 7 or 8.

First Player Auction: Each turn starts off with a simple auction to be first player. Players either bid or drop out, and it goes around until there's only one player left who pays for the privilege of being first player.

Build Track. You can lay up to four spaces of track each turn, usually connecting up two cities. The cost is as low as $2,000 a space (for building on open terrain) to as much as $8,000 a space (for building over ridges in the mountains). When you build you mark the "link" (a connection between two cities) with one of your trains to show that you own it.

Urbanize. You can urbanize any gray city by choosing one of the "new city" hexes (available in all colors but red) and placing it on the city. The city is now the new color. You also take two new goods cubes from the bag and place them on the city.

Urbanized cities are useful because they give you a new destination for goods of the appropriate color and because they introduce a few new goods. They can also be used offensively to block a player's longer delivery of goods, as will be made more clear in a second.

Upgrading engines is entirely vital because the delivery length of a good is also the amount you score, and thus a 2-link goods delivery is worth twice as much as a 1-link goods delivery, and you need an engine "2" to do that.

Deliver Goods Cube. This is really the heart of the game, and the goal you're trying to reach, because it's how you earn points. The object is to deliver a goods cube of a specific color to a city of the same color. However, as just noted, you can only move it across as many links (connections between cities) as your engine size. So, that's initially 1.

There's a bunch of finicky rules. You have to move a goods cube all the way as one action. You must stop in the first city of the appropriate color you reach. You can't pass through a city more than once or use a link more than once (both meaning you can't loop goods). But, the main idea of shipping is pretty clear: move a good from one place to another, using the longest path you can.

After delivery you then remove the transported good and earn points equal to the number of links you moved the goods cube across to reach its final destination. (You can use other peoples' links, but then they get the points for their links used.)

Build Western Link. Two of the cities, Desmoines and Kansas City, have special Western Links that you can build for $30,000. This dumps a bunch of red cubes in the city which can be delivered to Chicago, where they then multiply into more goods. It's a real special case that may not come up in many games, but is nicely evocative.

Ending the Game: Whenever a city is emptied of goods that's marked with a special plastic miniature on the board. When 10-18 cities are so closed (depending on the number of players), the game ends.

Railroad Tycoon has a somewhat complex family tree. The original computer game was produced by Sid Meier, with some help from Bruce Shelley. Bruce Shelley was also a contributor to the railroad board game, 1830, and as a result some of 1830's mechanics (primarily the stock and the ability to do hostile takeovers of your opponent's companies) ended up in RRT.

Age of Steam is the nearest design to Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame. Overall, RRT is a slightly simplified and considerably more friendly game system than Age of Steam. The economics are considerably more forgiving and the long-term strategic planning is easier to figure out because all the goods start off on the board. In addition, the components of RRT are 100% nicer than the ones in Age of Steam. RRT also has a few new aspects, in the Railroad Tycoon and Operations cards and the western links, each of which introduces some interesting variations to the game. Overall, Age of Steam will continue to appeal to those who want a harsh, unadulterated, serious game, but for everyone else, RRT will be a better, more enjoyable design.

Overall, Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame is a beautifully themed game that really feels like a railroad game. Perhaps that's the components, or perhaps that that's the game system, but you genuinelly get the feeling of building rail lines across the eastern United States. This creative force is a lot of what makes the game fun, as you watch your empire slowly blossom.

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