Steven

The passenger element added to this game adds a great deal of strategic depth to this game. It plays just like the base game with the following exceptions:
– You have 3 passengers which you can place on the board at either end of any newly claimed route.
– There are two types of additional cards in the game, passenger cards and 4+ Locomotives. Passenger cards help you move your passengers when you chose that action. 4+ Locomotives are just like normal locomotives except you can only use them in routes of length 4 or longer, and they don’t take up your whole turn when taking them from the face-up cards.
-In addition to the normal 3 actions you can choose from on your turn (take train cards, claim a route, draw new tickets), there is the move passenger action. Taking this action allows you to move one of your passengers along your routes, picking up “merchandise tokens” from each city along the way. Your passenger may only move along routes belonging to you, except each passenger card you have allows you to move across one opponent’s route. Most cities have only 1 token, worth 2 points, but others have stacks of 3 worth 4/3/2 or 3/2/1. (You take the highest token available when your passenger passes through. Berlin has four tokens worth 7/6/5/4. Once used the passengers are removed from the game.

The passenger addition adds a good deal of strategic depth. Figuring out when to best use your passengers to gain the most points adds a unique challenge to this game. Obviously connecting to Berlin is very competitive, but like in all TTR games, getting routes that go well together is very important as well.

The components of this game are the same as all TTR games. The cards are absolutely beautiful, however. Each card is unique, depicting a different Marklin model train car of the appropriate color.

My only real issue with this game is that with the addition of the passenger cards, you can get into a situation where the card display has to normal locomotives, two passenger cards, and one other card. Since the display only refreshes when there are 3 locomotives or 3 passenger cards, this situation can really slow the game down if nobody wants the single face-up colored card available.

Despite this one minor drawback I really enjoy this game. If you’re a fan of TTR it’s definitely one of the better games in the series.