Railway Boom

Cube rails, auctions and Luciani: this was always going to get my attention. On the table, it earns it, with a handsome map of Japan whose hexes, cities and tourist destinations are not decoration but the territory on which the whole contest is fought.

Each game begins with four scoring objectives and four route goals, with a different combination every time. The scoring objectives are the real centre of the game; if you intend to win, your planning starts there. Then come four rounds, each comprising four auctions followed by an income/operations round. It is a clean structure, although it does not reward buying whatever happens to look useful.

You auction first for locomotives and carriages, then for concessions that let you extend your network and acquire goods contracts, then for technologies, and finally for priority in that round’s scoring. The interesting decision is how hard to drive an auction in order to deny an opponent something, without leaving your own collection of trains and carriages unable to operate efficiently in the operations round. The auctions permit pleasing amounts of extraction and obstruction, while the small engine gives good purchases consequence without swallowing the game.

It is not quite a euro and not quite a cube rail; it is, however, an exceptionally honest game: brisk, demanding in the right measure, and difficult to exhaust through repeat play.