OUR REVIEW

Dominion meets Railway game

Trains

Rails are arriving

People love to categorize the world! So, small wonder that board games, too, are put into category boxes. Two of the currently most popular categories are deck building games and railway games.

Now and then game designers try to combine different categories for a new game, achieving quite different results from "not here - not there" to "ingenious".

So - what happens if you cross-breed a deck building game with a railway game? The result is called Trains and is a design of the Japanese game designer Hisashi Hayashi. The German language edition is published by Pegasus Spiele.

The basic mechanism was taken from Dominion (For an elaborate description of the Dominion mechanism please see other reviews.) Even the cards in Trains correspond for the bigger part to their equivalents in Dominion. There are Train cards corresponding to the Money cards in Dominion, and therefore can be used to pay for other things and for which even the ratio of cost/efficiency corresponds 1:1 to that of the Dominion Core game. There are several randomizer cards with varying abilities and effects, only eight of those cards are used in an individual game of Trains and provide some variation, again nearly identical to Dominion. There are also victory point cards, even those are very similar to those in Dominion, but providing a manifestly worse cost/efficiency ratio.

Entirely new in Trains are those cards that take the railroad game into play. First and foremost I need to mention the game board that is spread on the table. This board shows a map featuring plains, rivers, mountains, towns, oceans and out-of-the-way locations. The basic game comes with two such boards, for Tokyo and Osaka. You can now use Rail Laying cards to place railway tracks into those landscapes, an action costing a bit more or a bit less money, which must be paid for with the afore-mentioned Train cards. Each player builds his own railway network in this way. At the end of the game players score victory points for connecting towns and out-of-the-way locations. However, towns must first be upgraded in order to yield victory points. For such upgrades there are the Station cards, which allow you to set up a train station in any town of your choice.

It must be mentioned here that you have to take a completely useless Waste card both for playing Stations cards and for Playing of Rail Laying cards or Buying Victory Point Cards. The consequence is, that players' decks are constantly and permanently bursting with garbage, in the truest sense of the word.

All in all, Trains, despite all similarities, plays rather differently compared to Dominion. While you need to buy victory points in Dominion in the guise of cards, this turns out to be a rather inefficient track in in Trains. Much more important in Trains are the points that you can set up on the board. Furthermore, the basic deck building mechanism is, due to the heavily felt spamming of your deck with cards that are completely useless, considerably weakened.

The variation in cards and thus the replay value are, of course, considerably higher in Dominion, with its by now innumerable expansions. But this gives a lot of potential for Trains, as well as for new cards as for new boards.

For me, the allure of a deck building game is essentially, even before an elegant mechanism, is in the options for deck building. And in that aspect Trains is, at least so far, clearly weaker than Dominion, even when considering the railway part of the game. But that is my personal opinion and I am sure that Trains will have its fans. Its existence, all in all, is justified. And so I would place it somewhere in the middle between "not here - not there" and "ingenious". There are better deck building games and there are better railway games, but the mixture is interesting and will gladly join a game when Trains is put on the table.

Markus Wawra

Players: 2-4

Age: 12+

Time: 60+

Designer: Hisashi Hayashi

Artist: Ryo Nyamo

Price: ca. 40 Euro

Publisher: Pegasus Spiele 2013

Web: www.pegasus.de

Genre: Deck building, railways

Users: With friends

Version: de

Rules: de en fr jp

In-game text: yes

Comments:

Dominion variant

Simple, clear design

Standard mechanisms

Compares to:

Dominion and its variants

Other editions:

Okazu /Japon Brand, Alderac, Filosofia

My rating: 4

Markus Wawra:

Trains turns Dominion into a railway game and, taken all in all, this artistic feat works quite well. But in the long run it doesn't really enormous me. The strategic choices are rather limited and this reduces the replay value. In total a rather average game, but with lots of potential if followed by very good expansions.

Chance (pink): 3

Tactic (turquoise): 1

Strategy (blue): 2

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 1

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0