Railroad Tycoon

Overview
Train themed boardgames have been around for a long time and Ive had the pleasure of playing some of them, mainly Ticket to Ride, Empire Builder and, of course, Railroad Tycoon.

One would think that Railroad Tycoon is an adaptation of the very famous videogame series by Sid Meier, but very quickly you´ll realize that it is not so, the name is only used as a sales tactic in my opinion. Once you get over this annoying fact, you can start enjoying a very engaging, and sometimes quite tense, race for the cubes game.

The game concept is fairly simple, you must build a network of rails between cities in order to deliver the goods (represented by color cubes), to cities of the same color, the longer the delivery, the bigger the reward of Victory Points. You must mainly do this for a predetermined number of rounds trying to score the largest amount of VPs in order to win the game. The inclusion of special awards, cards and actions give the game just the right amount of variety to keep it entertaining.

The game comes with an enormous board divided in three assemblable parts (youll need a fairly large table to play this one), made out of a nice, thick cardboard. My favorite elements are all the plastic parts: locomotives and empty city markers, that are very detailed and solid. All the other elements are quite good also (cards, money, rail tiles and loans are nicely illustrated).

Gameplay
You are allowed to build anywhere on the map, its not obligatory to have all your rails on the same network, this simple rule together with the fact that the spaces for building rails is quite limited, gives the game a good sense of tension and adds great interactivity between players, as you try to win the cheapest and best routes between cities with the most goods on them trying to deliver the also very limited number of resources on the map before your adversaries.

Pros
The 3 turns/actions per round of play gives a good pace to the game, you dont have to wait a very long time for your next turn (like in Empire Builder).
The system runs as expected, havent found a loop hole or rule that can be taken advantage of (like in Ticket to Ride).

Cons
After several games it starts to get kind of repetitive since the only changes from one game to another is the initial color cube setup and starting cards. Experienced players will have a big advantage as you get to know the best routes and zones of the map.
The deck of special delivery and routes awards is too small and gets predictable after many games.

Conclusion
If you like the train themed games, this is definetively a most. Havent played Steam yet… maybe ill change my mind about the title of this post later.