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Times Played: 3, one 2 player (1 hour), two four player (2 hour, including rules explanation) Initial impression Knizia does good train.
Anyway, you get the idea. A rich vein for game designers and often tapped. Although heavily mined, however, Dr Knizia has proved the seam is not exhausted (so little time, so many metaphors). At first sight SR is unlike many of Reiner Knizia’s other games (Through the Desert, Ra, Samurai to name but a few) where the theme is secondary to the clever system underneath. SR has all the bits you would expect of a high-powered train game. A reasonably accurate map, loads of track, a pack of shares in seven historical railroads, commodity tokens, wooden stations, plastic trains, and, would you believe it, hexes. Even after reading the rules and discovering some of the more abstract mechanisms, you still cannot help but feel the rail baron as you play – developing lines, initiating boardroom battles over shareholdings, racing to connect cities and building up commodity interests. But don’t be fooled, Uncle Reiner has not undergone some strange conversion. Anyone looking for an update on the 18XX series can hang on to their calculators and retain their beards. SR is recognisably Reineresque, right from one of the early instructions in the rules – during his turn a player may choose two actions from a possible three options. As soon as I saw this I knew the world had indeed remained fixed on its axis and I had a good idea of what to expect: lots of things you want to do but only a few options per turn. Turning straight to the scoring conditions (not difficult to find in what is only a four page rulebook of which half the space is devoted to examples of play), I was further comforted. While the idea of the game is to earn the most cash, the banknotes are simply a means of keeping track of points scored. Players never spend money, they only receive it. It is through the options taken that players invest their limited resources – the money simply records the success of these choices. Points are gained in various ways, from establishing majorities in share holdings to connecting railway towns. Also, points are scored both during the play and at the end of the game. Keeping track of the various ways to score is probably the most difficult part of the game to learn (helped immeasurably by the player aid sheets available on the Gaming Dumpster site – recommended). Keeping track of the scoring is certainly a challenge; weighting the relative importance of the various methods is even more difficult, and, certainly, crucial to the play of the game. Anyway, I am getting ahead of myself. How does it work? At the beginning of the game the seven little plastic trains – attractively moulded in the shape of the eponymous train – sit on the fixed starting towns for their respective rail lines. These include the usual culprits such as the Great Western Railway, the Great Eastern and the London and North Western. The associated shares for these lines are stacked up in their holding boxes on the board. Each city space on the board also holds three colour-coded commodity tokens bearing its host city’s name. These tokens come in four flavours, steel, textiles, brewing and leather – nine tokens in each category. A fifth set of commodity tokens – passengers – remains offboard. Each player also receives seven wooden station markers in his colour. Finally, the 60 hexagonal track tiles are stacked up next to the board. These tiles are double-sided, with a straight section of track on one face and a curved section on the reverse. All in all, top marks for the bits. The game really does look lovely, particularly as the tracks begin to snake through the countryside and stations sprout up everywhere. Despite the variety and quantity of the components, the game manages to stay on the sane side of cluttered. The game play is relatively straightforward. Without repeating the rules verbatim, in his turn each player has a choice of:
That’s pretty much it. You can choose two actions of the same type (although you cannot extend the same railway twice) and, if either action results in a connection to a city or a railway town, money can be earned. In the former case a small sum will go the player/s with the majority of that city’s commodity tokens, in the latter case a variable sum depending on the number of towns and cities already connected will go to the player/s with the most stations on the line. Also, if a player connects a line to another player’s station, he will pick up a passenger token, which may score for him at the game end. The big payouts during the game can be earned through mergers (although connecting a railway town late in the game can be pretty rewarding). These occur when a player connects two lines with his move. When this happens the moving line dissolves into the line moved into, while the majority shareholder in the dissolved line receive a one-off payment based, again, on the number of connected towns and cities on the dissolved line. Existing shareholdings in the now defunct line are then exchanged for shares in the surviving line, on two-for-one basis. The games I have played certainly seem to show a pattern. The early game sees players establish interests in one or two lines, working up commodity interests in cities they plan to connect, and putting a few stations on the board. As the game progresses, and the building space contracts, the mergers begin, as do the veto wars, as players scratch their heads while trying to calculate the most profitable moves. The veto wars can be especially brutal, as they can often be used to wreck a dominant shareholding. The end game kicks in when there are only two or three lines remaining and not many railway tiles left. Now the players try to grab what they can if they see themselves as behind the pace (monetary holdings are kept secret), while those who think they are in with a shout try to hasten the conclusion by burning railway tiles or by leaving only one railway line with available shares. At this point the end game scoring round is calculated. Medium-size payouts are doled out to the players with the majority of tokens in each category of commodity, and variable size payments (again based on the number of connected towns and cities) for the majority shareholders and the players with the most stations on each surviving line. In all scoring situations, both during and after the game, the player who qualifies second (in terms of number of stations, shares or commodities/city tokens) also receives a payout half the amount awarded to the winner. It is no surprise that a good third of the rules are devoted to scoring methods. As can be seen from this brief(ish) overview, an almost bewildering variety of strategies could be pursued. Do you go for the mixed approach, building up a balanced holding of shares, commodities and stations? Do you concentrate on commodities alone, hoping to get the majority in most of them for the end of game scoring as well as picking up payouts during the game when the cities are connected? Or do you go for the rail baron option, putting all your efforts into building up dominant shareholdings in one or two lines and merging other lines into your giant? And this is only a selection of the most obvious ones. SR strikes me as a game where the effort has gone in to make it seem effortless. The game plays quickly – even with three novices the game came in under two hours, including the rules explanation, and I suspect that time could be practically halved by experienced players. There is always a lot going on so, even when it is not your turn, you need to keep an eye on what the others are doing and you may become directly involved with veto rounds and scoring payouts. And the game looks fantastic. What is there not to like? Well, I’m not sure yet, although I have some minor suspicions. Remember to take all the following comments in the context of only a limited playing experience. SR is a game where a novice player will be supremely disadvantaged when playing someone with prior experience. Yes, there are many ways to score, but, so far at least, I suspect there are only a limited number of ways to score effectively. From my playing of SR so far, you cannot expect to win unless you have a dominant shareholding and also be first or second in the station stakes in one of the big surviving lines – and there may well be only one. Other lines may get through to the end of the game unmerged, but they will tend to small by comparison. The big lines are the ones that earn the huge payouts at the end of the game. Also, by gaining this dominant shareholding or station presence, not only have you probably picked up a tidy sum from connecting railway towns, you might also have managed to merge it into some tiddly little line near the end of the game. This not only gains another huge payout but, even with the two-for-one share exchange, you might still maintain majority control of the new line. Although I have not played enough to be sure, my guess is that any strategy based on the accumulation of commodities as its prime focus will condemn the player to the ranks of the also-rans. While it might be true that a commodity payout will sometimes make the difference between first and second, I suspect any action spent gaining tokens could have been better used elsewhere, by either building a station or extending a track. This is not to say the game is poorly balanced in its scoring options, it may have been the designer’s intent to create primary and secondary sources of points. I do wonder, however, if the commodity token route is so redundant as to have made their presence in the game somewhat superfluous. But these are early days and there is too much to like about this game to not keep trying it out until these suspicions are either confirmed or denied. A provisional 8, with movement likely.
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Well, let’s face it, with his obsession
for laying tiles he had to get round to its natural game theme eventually.
1830’s England – the new Iron Age. The emerging leaders of the
industrial revolution rush to link the country together in a flurry of railway
building. Vast fortunes are made and lost: for every successful line there are ten others
which will bankrupt their sponsors.