Small Railroad Empires

Small Railroad Empires is a borrowed-rule collage from lighter train games, with railways of the world plainly visible in its genetic material. It wants to be simple and brainy, but it has no fresh idea of its own and never gets near the territory occupied by Ride the Rails or Mini Express. Simplified is not automatically a crime. Here, it is the entire design brief.

The flow sends every player down much the same stripped-back route, with too little room for anyone to distinguish their position from the rest. Even using rails as tokens in a cube rail feels like a solution dispatched in search of a problem.

Achievements are presented as the main course, yet they are distributed almost evenly and create neither much conflict nor genuinely different directions. The game therefore tends to end one or two points apart, while the setup and random tiles appear to have completed a substantial share of the strategic work. Very tense, for a game with so little to say.

As a consumer experience, putting KS exclusives from expansions you did not order into the box after a failed pledge manager is merely one more sign that nobody followed the thought through. The solo mode, at least, looks OK. If you own no train game at all, this may manage a few plays; otherwise, the good introductory cube rails are just as accessible and much less inclined to sell setup as strategy.