Based on their hand, they can then choose to purchase more cards with their “train” cards, build a station in a city in their railroad network with a “station” card, put down more rails with “lay rails” cards, or perform certain actions with “action” cards.

Note that the Japan and Osaka boards contain un-crossable bodies of water, but they’re clumped together in a corner of the board and serve only to make space a little more precious. 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 his 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. What is really neat about Trains, is that every time you expand on the board(rails or stations or extra for building on existing opponent territory), you always collect “waste” cards. We love the artwork on all the cards as well as how the type of good on each train car ties to the special ability it offers. We’ve also found the games we play the most in our family are those where we don’t have to refresh ourselves on the rules every time we pull it out.Trains has the chance to be a great game with everyone if expansions start happening down the road and I fell in love with the game. Isle of Trains: All Aboard is all about balancing the need to upgrade your train, with loading cargo or passengers onto opponent’s train for big bonuses, and delivering cargo and passengers to their destinations before anyone else. It’s one I intend to keep in my bag for family gatherings, when conversation is more important than concentration. Its simplified ruleset makes Trains approachable, but it contains the same deep gameplay as the heaviest of the genre.

The railways of today are amazing things and bullet trains, freight trains and more keep entire countries running. There are 16 piles of cards to arrange in a common area; 8 of these are static from game to game, while the other 8 are determined randomly through the use of an included randomizer deck.

Each of these cards features some lovely artwork at the bottom, a special ability icon at the top and is numbered between 1-84. From laying down rails, expanding into rivers and mountains, to building stations and even putting down a rail with another person, you gain a Waste card, giving you nothing but an extra card of nothing. Also, I have really enjoyed playing it with Caitlin (my 10-year-old) she picked up how to play straight away and we played four games in a row with her winning one of them and wanting to play more the next day, but the timing wasn’t right. While you still have you main currency (reflected as trains), you now have the Lay Rails and the Station Expansion cards, allowing you to lay the rails towards cities and build stations in those cities to net you the most points. Both of these elements can really diminish the playability of your hand, so you really need to consider the cost of your actions.

There’s always some downtime during trips where pulling out a light card game is great to play while sitting around chatting. Unlike Dominion’s approach that has you sitting on a runaway engine of victory point generation, Trains lets you build an engine, then bogs it down – as everything you do on the boards throws waste cards into your deck. It has some decisions to it, but there’s also a significant amount of luck that may frustrate players who value Strategy with a capital S.This is really killer with “Tourist Train” in the game, because every time it is played, it scores a point. Actions include things like swapping cards in the lineup, moving cards in the lineup, forcing every player to discard a specific card in their lineup, or protecting a card from discard. or Love Letter), but it is nice in the way it feels like you are playing a classic card game with a twist to bolster its appeal.

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). It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout.Finally, 30 neutral-colored wooden Station markers are placed near the board for use by all players. These abilities are also pretty straightforward, allowing you to move carriages forward or backward two spaces or swap a carriage with that in another space. All photos on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4. Trains’ is the sort of game that begins training montages glaring at pictures of Dominion stuck to its mirror. But sometimes a light game that doesn’t take itself too seriously is just what you want, and this fits the bill nicely.