Small Railroad Empires

I gave it away from the start: Small Railroad Empires was a major disappointment for me. It is a fake little collage of ideas borrowed from simple railway games, with the shadow of Railways of the World hanging heavily over it, yet without bringing any freshness or identity of its own. It wants to be simple and “brainy”; it mostly succeeds at being simplified and flat. And when games like Ride the Rails and Mini Express exist, putting trains in a box and hoping nobody looks out the window is not enough.

At its core, we all lay out our rail networks and chase achievements, which the game presents as the heart of the whole affair. Supposedly, that is where the direction and modest cleverness of a session lie: I build, adapt to the available tiles, and try to get to the goals before everyone else.

In practice, though, players seem to be doing almost the same thing, with very little genuine differentiation in their choices. Achievements are distributed almost evenly, while the final score is often separated by one or two points that feel decided more by the initial setup or random tiles than by any exciting contest. Bravo: a photo finish, but without the race to justify it.

And as a consumer experience, things keep going wrong. The decision to put KS-exclusive content from expansions I did not order into the box, because the pledge manager was a complete failure, is beyond me. So is the idea of having tracks as tokens in a cube rail. It is like looking at a game that is not sure what it wants to be, or how it wants to present itself.

If you have absolutely no train game at all, it might produce a few decent sessions — always look on the bright side of life. But the good introductory cube rails are already approachable and play much better. The only other positive I can give it is that its solo mode seems okay. Lol.