Railway Boom

Cube rails, auctions, and Luciani: of course I backed the Kickstarter wearing a spacesuit. Equally obviously, I had forgotten that I backed it, so after buying it at retail, the pledge turned up too. Yolo. It is the first time this has happened to me, but I do not mind much: Railway Boom is a great game. If nobody I know wants it at a bargain price, I will bring it along on the trip for a raffle, beside the rest of my failed procurements with duplicate and triple copies. And honestly, I will not have any trouble playing it again.

On its lovely map of Japan, with hexes, urban centres, and tourist destinations, setup brings out four scoring objectives and four route goals each time. That variability is substantial rather than decorative: the scoring objectives are the alpha and omega for anyone who wants to win. The game runs across four rounds, and each round has four auctions before an income/operation round. The basic rhythm is clear, but the decisions are anything but automatic.

In the auctions, I first compete for locomotives and wagons, then for concessions to develop a network on the map and obtain goods-transport contracts, then for technologies, and finally for priority in the round's scoring. That is where the substance lies: the bidding has real complexity and room to squeeze every advantage from it, while the operation rounds ask me to optimise the combinations of trains and wagons I have acquired. Opponents are not merely present; they determine the cost and availability of what I need, while the objectives pressure every investment to serve a specific plan.

It is not quite a euro and not quite a cube rail, but that middle ground suits it extremely well. It is simple without being shallow, it never becomes tiring, and the changing objectives combined with the auctions give it tremendous replayability. For me, it is a very solid great game, and very highly recommended.