Tramways

My relationship with Tramways began badly. After the first game, we were left with a slight sourness—enough for me to call it the worst gaming experience of the year and think it deserved a discussion thread of its own. It is one of those games that can very easily produce love/hate reactions. Thankfully, that evening did not end there: we went back to Caverna, played it somewhat wrongly again, but at least had an honest brawl and a hard fight over the final score. Nothing but love for Caverna—but, strangely enough, Tramways did not leave my mind.

The core of Tramways, as I have experienced it, is the altered auction that determines the order in which we play each round. This is not a routine procedure before the “real” game begins: it is where the tension is concentrated, because priority is valuable and everyone contests it. Especially in our latest five-player game, it became an outright bloodbath.

That fight for turn order is tied to the need to know how to draft your cards. If you do not, the game will not comfort you or grant you a safe correction; it will simply let you feel the consequences. The interaction, then, needs no fanfare: it lies in the contest for priority and in the choices that make things more expensive or less available to everyone else.

I now see it as a very effective balancing act, for my tastes, between a hard, tight euro and the unforgiving logic of a Splotter game such as Food Chain Magnate or Antiquity, which does not care about your tears in the slightest. It is not a game that will stroke a new player's ego, and I completely understand why it can divide people. But the more I replay it, the more my appreciation grows: the original sourness has turned into respect for a design that demands you learn its terms.

Updated session

The later session plainly changed my opinion for the better. Although three of the five players were playing for the first time, meaning we again did not get to try the Dystopian expansions, the base game stood on its own and the conflict over turn order shone. For now, the expansions remain on the shelf beside the Clinic expansions—as precious alternative décor, obviously.