Christmas pressies and Christmas Gaming!

Merry Christmas!! And happy boxing day! Great family Christmas all round with everyone getting something nice that they always wanted - as it is every year; we get one big present each and then lots of little ones. And my big present was Railways of the World! A massive re-imagining of Railroad Tycoon that uses a huge Eastern Seaboard map of the United States and one smaller one of Mexico. The game also contains huge "empty city" markers, lots of plastic trains, millions of hexagonal track markers, oodles of money, game cards and other play pieces. You just get loads of stuff in your huge box.

The basic aim of the game is that dotted around the map are coloured cities marked with a number and the game comes with a large number of little coloured wooden cubes representing different goods, oil, wood, steel etc. Each city has a number of random cubes placed on it as indicated by the number on the city and then the idea of the game is to simply raise money to place track linking cities and delivering a coloured cube from one city to another city of that colour. The game is based on Railroad Tycoon which in turn is based on the computer game of the same name and this is exactly what happens in the computer game.

Players can also upgrade engines to take goods further, score more points and get more money for delivering those goods. We haven't played it yet, but I have been through the very short looking rules (there is a short set for the game and then a short set for each map - there are also other maps you can get, Europe, Western USA, England and Wales etc.) and it does look great and easy to play yet very in-depth.

Looking forward to my first play against Anita!!

Also on Boxing Day we all had a family game of 7 Wonders - our family favourite.