Geekshow

A Look at Railroad Tycoon

Friday, February 13th, 2009

Game Night opens up shop by taking a look at one of our favorite and most played board games, Railroad Tycoon. The game is the perfect example of the board game industry. What you see is not always what you get. You may see a game based on a PC train sim game. But what you get is a competitive business game with very easy to follow rules.

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In the Board Gaming community, railroad games are a very popular breed. They may not have the sales figures of the big name games, but they have a cult following amongst a large portion of the board game community. So, when I was first getting heavy into the board gaming scene, I wanted to try out a game from the coveted “genre” of games.

The Board Gaming community is a lot like a dog breeding community in that they hate game comparisons. You will often be ridiculed for comparing the mechanics to one game to the mechanics of another. So saying something like, “This game feels like Risk, except for…” is a bad thing to do with hardcore gamers. So, when you start looking for a train game to try out, you’re going to get a lot of responses about how you can’t compare the train games since they are all so different. Honestly, I agree with that in many regards. Age of Steam and Railroad Tycoon are similar games (They share a developer). Meanwhile, neither game is even remotely similar to Ticket to Ride (Those of your with an Xbox 360 could give the Live version of TTR a trial run). So, when I was deciding which game to play first, I had to look for something familiar.

Railroad Tycoon is a board game based on a Sid Meier Train Sim video game. I had tried out the video game before. I’m the type of person that enjoys sim games, depending on the mood I’m in. So for a good month or two, I was very enamored by the game. Occasionally, I will pick it up again, and try it out. It’s pretty fun building your network of track, trains, and stations. So, when looking for a train board game, I stuck with the name I knew. Railroad Tycoon: The Board Game is not Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon. They are worlds apart in how they play, and where the focus lies. Below is my written review of the board game, so that you can see what it actually is.

Up until Railroad Tycoon, my game collection was made almost exclusively of Fantasy Flight games. I respect Fantasy Flight for their constant commitment to excellence in their design, components, and customer service. So this was not a bad thing for me at all. However, Railroad Tycoon was a shocking departure from my standard fare. The components were still solid, but the whole package didn’t feel quite as mass produced as a Fantasy Flight game would feel. This could be seen as both a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective. However, there were enough things that were right with the package, that it has since become one of my most played games.

Gameplay

Railroad Tycoon is a simple game to learn, but complex in how it plays. The only real amount of luck that takes place in the game comes from the initial draw of goods cubes to the board, and the order in which cards come into play. The remainder of the game really revolves around each player’s ability to develop a strategy that  takes several things into consideration. Developing this strategy, adapting to what your opponents do on their turns, and learning when to open the wallet are the keys to winning the game.

When the game board is set out, a number of cubes will be placed on the various cities of the game. These cubes will be one of several colors. Blue, Purple, Black, Yellow, or Red. The object of the game, in the nutshell, is to move the cubes to a city that matches the cube’s color. A black cube needs to arrive at a black city, a red cube needs to go to one of the rare red cities, etc. The amount of distance that a cube travels will depend on the score that you receive for the movement. For example, if you move a cube from one city to the next, that’s one point. But if you move it along one link, and then to a second link, that counts for 2 points, assuming both links were on your own track.

So the ideal situation is for you to build a long enough track that you can get cubes from their origination city to their destination city without needing to use your opponent’s track. To do so, you will be jockeying for positions in and out of each city. If all the available slots in/out of the city are taken, you will be cut off from creating more. However, this constant struggle to get the prime locations on the board is not all you have to worry about. In addition, you need to worry about upgrading your train to a higher level in order to be able to deliver the goods cubes over a long distance. If a cube needs to travel 2 links of distance, then you need a level 2 train. 3 links needs a level 3 train, etc.

Add in your Tycoon card’s goal (Issue the least number of shares, Have the most money, etc) and the strategy gets deeper. The order in which cards come up will further increase the amount of strategy you need to have. Because Cards come up prior to the auction, every player will have the opportunity to get the card first. But if that’s something you want to do, you will have to spend money to get that chance.

Like any good business game, spending money is a big part of the game. In this case, you don’t actually have any cash to start the game. Everything you do requires you to issues shares. For every share of stock you issue, you get $5,000 to spend however you please. The problem is, once that share is issued, you can never buy it back.  This is a tough thing to deal with, because you will often finding yourself just short of the cash you need to do something. You can issue that share, but for the rest of the game, you will have to pay dividends on that share. Dividends mean that you lose out on the money that you would otherwise collect at the end of each round. For each share you have, your income is $1,000 less.

By the end of the game, you hope that you’ve balanced your spending habits correctly. If you haven’t, then you find yourself far outside of the winner’s circle. Ultimately, that balance of spending money and making money is what makes the game difficult. Do you upgrade to that level 4 train now in order to deliver the 4 link cube deliveries? What if it requires you to issue a share or two to do it? It’s a game of give and take. And the players you are competing against rarely make it easier on you.

Rules

One of the things that makes the gameplay stick out so much is the relative depth compared to the amount of rules. The strategy may not be as deep as a game with 37 pages. But in this case, it only requires learning 10 pages of rules. And because the rules are so simple, you can learn the game in a couple tries, and then you can teach other players in less than 10 minutes time. The amount of options and strategy available to players is significant as compared to the effort it takes to learn the game.

The me, this is what makes the game so addictive. I will often find myself taking a break from games. I may not play a particular game during a gap of 2 months. But in the case of Railroad Tycoon, whenever I come back to play again, I always remember the rules as if I had just played yesterday. You may forget some of your strategy, but chances are, you won’t need to keep picking up the manual to refresh yourself on the rules. If you do, it’s simple issues like knowing how cities have to empty out to end the game for the number of players you have playing.

It’s nice to know that you don’t always have to have a heavy system in order to have a lot of depth to a game. This game does a great job at proving that point.

Most of the issues I have with the rules of Railroad Tycoon were solved in the expansion, Rails of Europe. Often, debates can arise over what sort of terrain you are building your track over. Is there enough brown here to make it a hill? Are you crossing the river, or running along it? For the most part, those issues were solved for the expansion. The other issues I had just needed a house rule or two to fix for our group. For instance, we play with a rule that states that once a player begins building track between two cities, they reserve the entrance/exit in both locations. We felt that the game was competitive enough that we didn’t need to encourage it along by allowing the blocking of players’ track.

Components

The components in Railroad Tycoon are far from the best I’ve seen. However, they are also far from the worst. Overall, the word solid describes the pieces that come in the box well. The wooden cubes, the plastic trains, the money, stocks, and train cards all do the job very well. In fact, if that was all there was to the game, this would be a nearly perfect game in my view.

However, you have to take the rest of the game into account as well. That mostly pertains to the board itself. It measures at a staggering 36″x45″. That’s large enough that most standard tables would be lucky enough to fit it alone. Not to mention all the stuff that players need to play with. So before getting the game, players need to take their available gaming space into consideration. Unfortunately though, the biggest problems with the board come from the quality, and not the size.

Railroad Tycoon is notorious for its board warping issues. This is an annoying problem for someone like me that cares so much for the appearance of the game. But in this case, it also effects the gameplay a bit. Because the board is split up into three sections, it’s important that those section sit flush together. But they don’t. Instead, one section will hover a good 1/2″ over the piece it needs to be hanging out with. The result is that some areas of the board are difficult to place track on.

The other big issue is that the board has an overall washed out look to it. But this is particularly a problem when dealing with the purple and blue cities. Instead of having purple and blue, you really get purple and violet. This becomes an issue with gameplay not only because you have to be extra carefuly with your deliveries, but also because you have to watch your opponents to make sure they don’t make similar mistakes. Eventually, you will be able to play without thinking about it so much. But it’s a shame that the problem exists to begin with.

Overall

I can’t imagine having not played this game. Mind you, in most cases when we played the game, we played with only two or three players, which is considered the least amount of fun. However, for us, it has still worked out very well. These days, we rarely touch the game because there is a new shiny expansion that fixes a great number of the original game’s problems. But I still love the original, and would recommend it to just about anyone. At the very least, everyone should give the game a play through. It could turn out that something upsets you to the point where you can’t enjoy it. Perhaps the balance with a small number of players, or the train theme. But this is one game worth taking the risk with.

It is worth mentioning that a lot of the issues I have with the game are supposedly fixed in the international editions of the game (Though there is the slightly annoying issue of certain components being in another language). Also, when the game is re-printed/re-branded, these problems will almost certainly be absent from the new version. But honestly, knowing what I know about the game now, I don’t think the issues would keep me away from the game as it is.

You can purchase this game at Thoughthammer:

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Credits:

Randy – Editor, Show host, & Written Review
Russell – Show Host
Ray – Recoding Studio, Lights, Sound, & Camera

Also, thanks to Thoughthammer for making this possible, and to Beatnik Turtle for the intro music “Beat People Up (Remix)“!

(http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17133)