Game of Trains

Product Information

Regardless, you definitely won’t mind the gap between your turns - there is very little downtime in Game of Trains. The astute amongst you may have noticed that this therefore means that choosing which carriage to place isn't a simple numbers game, as you may not necessarily want to give the next player access to a swap ability that could carelessly help them, or worse allow them to win the game.

Romero created Train over the course of nine months, [1] with the game releasing on April 29, 2009, [2] at a Games for Change conference. However, please be aware that certain third-party services, such as the web browsers you use, might engage in data collection or retrieve information - often in the form of cookies. In the game, players are tasked with transporting passengers along a railway before their opponents. Game of Trains (GoT) is a simple filler game, which consists of 88 cards (4 engine cards and carriage cards numbered 1 – 84). All photos on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.It's light enough that you can play it with more casual gamers and they will grasp the concepts straight away but there's also a surprising depth of strategy, playing the odds and a careful balance between playing the best move for yourself and denying the other players the opportunity to snap up a juicy card. On a turn, the player can do one of two things: draw a card from the draw pile and replace one of the cards in their train line with the newly drawn card, or take a face-up card from the middle of the table and use it as a special power.

So players can make choices based not only on their own train, but also based on how they want to impact their opponents. It’s not the kind of game I’m always in the mood for–I prefer games with a little more meat on their bones–and I won’t often suggest it with my regular gaming groups, but it’s one I’m always willing to play because there are meaningful decisions in the game, the art is pleasant to look at, and I find the puzzle in the game a fun one to solve, especially since the whole game, start to finish, doesn’t take very long to play and doesn’t involve much rules-learning investment from the players.Additional Lay Rails and Station Expansion cards are available for purchase during the game, but your starting Normal Trains are the only ones you’ll get (more powerful train cars are purchased during the game). 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).

Through the course of the game players will not only lay rails over several different terrains and try to reach the most valuable destination cities, but they will need to pepper their tracks with revenue generators – both industrial buildings (such as a Control Room) and consumer establishments (Amusement Parks, Apartment Buildings, etc. 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!The piles of cards to be purchased include advanced Trains, additional Lay Rails (and better versions), additional Station Expansions, and Action cards, as well as Buildings which are worth straight VP at the end of the game.