22 Feb

Railroad Tycoon

Filed under: Boardgames 5 Responses

A fantastically huge board that nevertheless covers only the eastern half of the continental United States.

After playing both Age of Steam and Steam, it was only fitting that we should play the last member of this family of train games. Sean seemed quite reluctant to play this however. Perhaps because this feels like a very un-Euro game. Steam in particular felt very Euro-ish to me, what with the role selection mechanic, the choice of earning Victory Points or Income and even the importance of finding clever ways to connect cities in such a way as to maximize scoring opportunities. Railroad Tycoon on the other hand, despite sharing the same core mechanics, feels more American. Here’s a summary of some of the differences:

  • The board is huge, bigger than it needs to be actually. Even the hexes and goods tiles are bigger. I understand that this is meant to be a more accessible game than the Steam family, but this seems to be overdoing it. The same goes for the plastic miniatures that are included to mark cities emptied of goods and thereby the approaching end of the game. They’re just too gimmicky. The map makes a noticeable effort to reflect the real world geography of the United States but due to this also includes lots of space that no one will ever bother building railroad tracks on.
  • But the real annoyance is that the printers seems to have messed up with the colors on the board. Since I have red-green color blindness, I’m used to this in boardgames, but with this game everyone else seemed to have problems differentiating some of the colors on the board and the goods cubes as well. I understand however that the successor game Railways of the World has since fixed this and made the board smaller.

Tons of other stuff as well, including paper money, share certificates, plastic tokens to mark emptied cities, locomotive cards etc.
  • Like the basic version of Steam, you take out loans (shares) as and when you need the cash, which suits me just fine. The scoring track indicates both victory points and income per turn. However, while the income rises rapidly as you advance along the track, it tapers off rapidly and eventually starts dropping. If you score high enough, you can loop back and have your income rise again, but this nevertheless means that players will need to plan for some lean times when their scores rise, an interesting design choice.
  • Probably the biggest change is that there are now cards that can be played for various effects or claimed for points. Some of them are set up at the beginning of the game and provide instant points to the first player to achieve the goals listed. Others may be taken as an action and played to do such things as building railway tracks for free or provide a lasting effect. Some of the most important goals include being the first to connect a network between two specific cities, mimicking the historical development of the railways in the United States.
  • Average distances between cities seem longer. Actually, the northeast side of the map has many cities close together but hemmed in by the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other, there is very little room to build. Once past the mountain range however, the land progressively becomes more open, with cities sparsely scattered. To me, this makes the map more interesting than the Age of Steam and Steam maps I’ve played.

Share certificates and cards, including Hotel cards which give you 1 income each time anyone delivers a good to the named city.

As expected, I fared by far the worst by issuing far too many shares too early and thereby entering a death spiral. I was just too hung up over my secret objective of being the first to upgrade to a level six locomotive and so issued shares to upgrade it prematurely without being able to actually use it. It’s not a mistake I’m apt to do again. But everyone else also messed up by not competing with Sean for the northeast. My thoughts:

  • Steam annoyed me because it seemed like the best way to score points was to arrange for goods to be delivered the long way around even though the two cities could actually be quite close together on the map. I feel that this effect is much diminished in Railroad Tycoon due to the greater distances between cities. The locomotive level in this game actually goes all the way up to 8, but no one ever bothered to upgrade that far because it’s hard to make that long a route. This makes it feel like much more of a transportation game to me.
  • Likewise, the various goal cards gives you some map-specific options that make the game much more thematic. Obviously the major line bonus cards should be laid out before the game so everyone will know what to aim for, but I do think that they make the game less abstract. Even the individual Tycoon cards help in this respect.
  • Maybe I’m being a noob, but with Age of Steam being so abstract, I never quite saw the point of having many different maps for it. This is certainly not the case here. Between the map-specific rules for little things like the Western Connection, added costs for crossing the mountain range without following the ridges and the various cards, I can see why different maps will make for very different games.

Despite the oversized board and the evident production problems, I find myself liking this game. I guess Age of Steam / Steam is just too hardcore for me and this accessible version is just what I need. In fact, after reading up on it on BGG, I think I’ll be buying Railways of the World in the near future, especially since it comes with an additional map and supports two players. As I keep saying, I really should make more of an effort to train myself to play games like this more often so else I’m going to lose whenever map-based games hit the table.

Sean monopolized the critical northeast and paid big bucks to cross the mountain range at the beginning. He ended up winning the game even with the fewest city connections on the map.
Written on February 22 2011 and is filed under Boardgames. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Railroad Tycoon”

frags

I love the look of the share certificate. I can understand what you mean by the screwed up board colour. Looks messed up even in that photo you took.

I find it interesting that board game makers sometimes go with a video game brand for their board game. Do you think that makes a difference when it comes to sales of it?

wankongyew

Since videogames have a much wider audience than boardgames, obviously boardgames tied-in with videogames have a leg up on marketing. The new version of the Civilization boardgame by FFG for example was promoted by piggybacking on the release of Firaxis’ Civilization V. And there is now even a Plant vs. Zombies boardgame:
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/93169/plants-vs-zombies-the-board-game

But boardgames are a small enough market that sometimes videogame names are used without being officially licensed. For example, there is a Transport Tycoon boardgame, but it appears to be a little known one that was made by a freight company for promotional purposes:
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37736/transport-tycoon

Other times, the names were actually used by boardgames first before a videogame was made of it. Civilization for example was a boardgame long before Sid Meier made the PC version:
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/71/civilization

wankongyew

Oh, and I think this boardgame version of Railroad Tycoon has no connection with the Sid Meier version either. I don’t know what legal issues were involved but I imagine that one reason why the boardgame has since been renamed Railways of the World might be to avoid this confusion, in addition to allowing for expansions, i.e. Railways of Europe, Railways of England & Wales etc.

Chong Sean

i remember the 1st printing is licensed by the PC game, but then find it to expensive so in 2nd printing they changed the name.

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