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Author: David G. Watts Publisher: Schmidt Spiele 1984 Awards: Spiel des Jahres 1984 |
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This game for 2 to 6 players is about the period of railroad building.
The game contains 4 different maps (Germany, France, Western USA, Eastern USA) on which the players may compete to become the most important rail-baron. The playing is divided into two phases, the Rail-Building-Phase and the Race-Phase.
In the first phase the players start from some towns on the map building there railroad-web.
Each round a player rolls a die to see how much funds he has this round, and these funds he uses to build railways.
Here different sorts of landscape become important, since it is more expensive to build railways through mountains or over rivers than to simply cross open plains.
A nice feature of the game is the way the railways are marked:
The players use differently coloured wax-pencils to draw on the map, and since the maps are coated, the lines can be erased without problems. After all cities on a map have been connected to railways, the race-phase starts.
Here the players roll dices to figure out two towns.
Between these two towns a races takes place, and the players roll dices to move their trains along the railways.
Itīs important that players might use railways of other players, but they have to pay a fee to the owner.
Finally, the first two players to reach the finish get a financial bonus and then the next race is started.
This goes on until one player reaches a certain amount of funds and wins the game. Itīs hard for me to evaluate this game.
As a matter of fact, the game certainly offers an interesting amount of strategy, since the players have to do careful planning where to build their railways.
Thus the game certainly means fun, but to my mind the player stays a little bit uninvolved "beside the track".
Even the racing phase is a little bit strange, since here a very high amount of luck is introduced into the game. |
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Looking for this game? Visit Funagain Games! |
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