Mini Express

MOIDEAS’s Mini Express is a notably tidy little cube rail: four companies, a Europe or America map with small variations, and enough pressure to make the compact box feel rather more serious than it has any right to be. My group took to it immediately, which was entirely sensible.

On a turn, you either build a link or buy shares. Building gives influence in the companies indicated by the destination’s demand tile; buying shares spends influence, at a price set by that company’s current capacity to expand. The interesting decision is that building earns the currency of influence, while buying shares gives you a claim on the value created by all that building.

The interaction is not merely present for tax purposes. One company’s expansion alters costs and prospects for everyone, and the final influence ranking determines what each player’s share bundles are worth. That is the design’s hinge: shares are not just shares, but unequal bets on your standing within a company. It is Gerrits’s cube-rail thinking in concentrated form, with the pressure arriving promptly and without decorative machinery.

At roughly 45 minutes, the length is the proper counterweight to the bruising finish: you lose on details, flip the map, and start wanting another go. In the filler space shared with Ride the Rails and Irish Gauge, it is an exceptionally strong option; only MOIDEAS’s shipping costs make it less straightforward to buy than it ought to be.

Updated session

A later play, once the group had understood the game more fully, produced no passes at all, and the European map turned on the timing and manner of opening its ports. The judgement has not shifted: Mini Express remains a sharp, honest filler, even if Irish Gauge still competes for the same slot through its more eccentric mechanisms.