First play of Railways of the World!

Railways of the World - one of the grandest train games of them all. Or so I'm to believe. Having played a heck of a lot of Ticket to Ride, it seemed a good time to start exploring other, more complex train games. I got RotW for Christmas but haven't had the chance to play until today. I'd got all the bits out before - and there were a LOT of bits - and had a good look and had a few plays with the bits, but not really a full proper game.

I was going to set out to have a solo game, but Maya wanted to play, so the two of us went through the rules and I tried the best I could to explain in a child friendly way, plus left out a few rules, and I found surprisingly the game was quite simple! So the two of us set out to conquer Mexico - the game comes with a huge Eastern USA board for up to 6 players whilst also a lower number of players, 2 or 3, can easily play on the Mexican map.

Game start

The basic idea of the game is to deliver wooden cubes. Random cubes are drawn and placed on the cities on the board (each city has a number which corresponds to the number of random cubes drawn). Each city is also coloured representing a type of good that that city takes in. The very basic idea of the game is to lay track to connect a city to another and deliver a good from the start city to its destination.

Each track piece costs, the amount depends on the landscape you want to cross, open, mountain, river etc. And at the start the players have no money and only a type 1 train, which means goods can only be transferred from one city to another. As the game proceeds, more advanced engines can be purchased to transfer goods further.

Connecting Cities

In order to receive money, the player must start giving Bonds to the Shareholders - really you are just getting money from the bank for the bonds to pay for stuff. And every time you move a good along one rail connection, your score marker moves up one - the score marker indicates how much money you "earn" at the end of the turn. Once all the cubes of a city are used up, a chunky City Marker (a water tower, a crossing symbol etc) is placed on the city. Once a certain number of Markers are placed (depending on number of players), the game ends.

Then the number of Bonds are counted and used to deduct from the score to give a Final Score. Poor Maya took out a LOT of Bonds and ended up with a score of 0 even though she did quite well. I was glad she managed to play because she understood the rules perfectly and even reminded me to carry out key parts of the game. I did leave out a couple of rules such as paying shareholders at the end of the turn and Rail Baron cards to simplify on our first play but it was good enough.

A great game all in all, next to get Anita to play!

End game!