Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I recently bought Railways of the World from Boardgamecafe.net. As I wrote when I talked about Railroad Tycoon, it’s a type of game that I didn’t yet have a copy of in my collection. The nice thing about this particular edition is that it has a couple of nice improvements. For one thing, the color problems have been resolved so that even someone with color blindness like me can distinguish between them. Well, most of the time anyway. The other thing is that this is one game that can be said to actually scale well from two to six players even if that’s because it comes with the smaller Mexico map that’s designed for two to three players, while maintaining the huge Eastern US map for four to six players.

Shan and I just played a two player game with the Mexico map, so here are a few thoughts on it:

• The Mexico map is narrow and tough. Most of it is hilly terrain and there is plenty of water all around, so building is expensive. The best starting location is probably the area around Mexico City to the south and both Shan and I gravitated towards there but it’s not a complete shoo-in like the Eastern US map. The terrain there is just as rough as elsewhere, it’s just that distances between cities are a bit shorter.
• Like Rails of Europe, the bonus points for connecting specific pairs of cities are printed right on the map and can be completed at any time. However, unlike the Europe map, construction costs on the Mexico map are so high that I don’t think that loading up on debt to complete these connections is a great idea. You really need to make sure you have the right mix of goods to make use of your network. Service bounties are still implemented via cards and go to the first player to make a delivery to the stated city when the appropriate card turns up, making it an element of randomness.

• One new kind of card that comes with this map are the Trading Depots. When you play them, you play one of your own trains on a rail link owned by an opponent. After that whenever anyone delivers a good using that link, you earn one point. It sure sounds like a souped-up version of the old hotels, especially with few players and a map where players are unlikely to build more than one link between the same pair of cities. I wasn’t sure if this means that the player who uses this card then owns that link as well and can initiate deliveries using that link as there is no way to tell from the components who built that link originally.
• One problem with the Mexico map is that we’re a lot less familiar with Mexican geography than US or European geography. I mean most people knows approximately where on the map to look for New York or Paris, and at least have heard of the names of the various cities. This wasn’t true at all for Mexico and we had a hard time hunting around for the locations of the cities, which is especially hard when the board is covered by railway tiles.
• In our game, I managed to snag three of the four sets of bonuses for city connections but still lost the game because I had incurred too much debt to pay for them. It was an especially dumb thing to do when I had drawn the baron card that gave you bonus points for having the least issued bonds. Shan is still much better at me at spotting opportunities on the map and delivered many high value shipments.

• I also failed to play the auction game properly and didn’t force Shan to pay enough for the privilege of being able to snag the all important three point bonus for making the first three link shipment. I keep telling myself that the auction for first player is a crucial part of the game but I keep forgetting anyway.
• With just two players, other than jockeying for position early in the game near Mexico City, we mostly built our own networks and did our own thing. The only competition later on was trying to deliver goods out of the cities that both of us had connections to first while leaving the safe cities for later. So there’s definitely room for a third player on this map. We did have a lot of fun with this and I feel like I’m getting better at the game as I go along, which is crucial for maintaining interest in a game.
• I am amused that the game is sold as a base game system plus two expansions. They even have a rulebook for the base game plus a separate booklet for each of the two maps. I guess this is because the various parts were available separately before and selling it this way makes for a nice marketing bullet point. But I do think that this increases the confusion. For example, I don’t think that any of the rulebooks ever covers exactly how the railroad baron cards work. I simply dealt both of us a card each, but for all I know maybe you’re supposed to deal two cards to each player and have him pick one to keep. It seems to be an oversight when they had to decide which rule should go in which book.