Prussian Rails

Prussian Rails is, by contrast, an honest attempt. It did not blow me away the way Iberian Rails did, but there is a proper game here: trains, shares, and a few ideas that keep things interesting instead of letting them simply roll along on their own rails.

At its core, the experience revolves around the railway game and its shares. The decisions are not merely “put something down and be done”: how the shares are distributed affects the course of the game, and that is where the players become meaningfully entangled with one another.

That interaction can, however, come back to bite the game near the end. If the players drag it out, or if the shares have been distributed oddly, the finale risks becoming dull. It is not a disaster, just a small thorn in a game that otherwise wants to keep things brisk.

And brisk it is: 20–30 minutes total is a trivial amount of time for a train game, especially compared with others in the genre. At its rock-bottom price, I would pick it up without much thought if I wanted to dig a little deeper into train-game obsession.