Many years ago there was a listing at one of the major online retailers for a mysterious Japanese-language game that I had never heard of called TRAIN RAIDER. Details were pretty limited on it, and since everybody was all into German games at the time there really wasn’t much attention paid to it outside of a few fanatical collectors hell-bent on acquiring the most obscure, oddball games in existence. This was definitely one of those, the kind of bizarre, out-of-nowhere kinds of games that blip in and out of print and are relegated to the obscurity of shelves, damned to be rarely played if ever and practically forgotten even by the few who actually own them. Sometimes these kinds of games fall through the cracks because they probably ought too. But sometimes it is games like this where you find some really incredible concepts and innovation that should never have been shunted off by lesser games.

The description offered for TRAIN RAIDER sounded pretty intriguing- it was kind of an EMPIRE BUILDER-style train game but it had combat. It sounded like all of the typical train game stuff was there- drawing rails on the board with crayons, delivering goods to various cities throughout the 19th-century United States, upgrading locomotives, and establishing rail networks. But it also promised intense train-on-train violence, which is something practically unheard of in the gentile railroad worlds of TICKET TO RIDE and RAILROAD TYCOON. Armored locomotives with giant cannons were depicted on the cover along with a couple of anime-styled engineer characters who looked an awful lot like the typical Square Enix-styled spiky-haired androgens. I thought it looked pretty cool, but the difficulty of pulling off a DIY translation of the game into an English-playable form and the $70 price tag scared me away. I think the game was listed on the site for about fifteen minutes, and once it was sold out it never appeared there again. To date, I’ve never seen a copy for sale again. And oh, how I regret not buying it when I had the chance.

Thanks to one of those insane collectors, who happens to be a friend of mine—he snagged one of those copies, and I finally got a chance to play TRAIN RAIDER a couple of weeks ago. When we sat down to play, I kept telling myself that I wanted to hate the game. I wanted it to be terrible so that I wouldn’t want it, knowing full well that its incredible rarity would translate into outrageous expensiveness. “Please hate this game, please hate this game” was my mantra as we laid out the board depicting a strangely distorted United States. How St. Louis got below Atlanta I’ll never quite figure out. The components weren’t really all that great, despite an incredible armored train piece for every player, and the original Japanese cards were replaced with home-printed cardstock ones with English text. The entire board had to be pasted over with English city names and resources. It obviously took my friend a lot of work to get the game playable for those of us who don’t know katakana from hiragana. The good news is that it was totally worth it.

The game, simply put, is incredible. It’s brilliant, innovative, deep, chaotic, and almost impossibly fun for a rail game. I like train games a lot, including dry-as-a-bone economic ones like 1830, but they’re not exactly the kinds of games that get you cheering, laughing, and cursing. TRAIN RAIDER retains the logistics and planning that classic train games require, but shakes everything up by shifting from an economic focus (there isn’t even any money in the game) to conflict and competition. It is unlike any train game I have ever played, although its roots are clear and the influence of classic “crayon rails” games are clearly defined.

Each player manages one of six railroad companies established in two US cities in kind of a steampunk setting. The goal of the game isn’t to get rich, corner the market, or have the most valuable assets at the end- it’s to make your company the most honored and respected in the field. How very Japanese. There’s a number of ways that you can do this, chief among them being the completion of various missions that turn up throughout the game. Connecting cities earns honor points as your rail network grows. You can also get honor points by having the most destruction points (yes!) at the end of the game or by completing various secret objectives that appear on action cards. The game plays three to six players and it’s fairly long, so expect about 45 minutes per player.

Each turn starts with a player rolling 2D6 to come up with a number of ‘establishment points’ that represent infrastructure investments that each player will make for the turn. It puts everybody on a more or less equal footing, so if the die roller gets the big 12, everybody gets 12 unless they have action cards that give them a few more points. These establishment points are spent to draw segments from point to point on the map with a dry-erase marker in your company’s color. The idea is that you want to link up cities to create routes since your trains move faster on your company’s lines than they do on others. It costs more points to build in certain areas, such as over mountains, so careful budgeting is essential.

Once everyone has drawn their rails, everyone has an opportunity to exchange action cards for upgrade points. Trains upgrade along two basic tech trees, one focusing on speed and the other on combat. A neat feature is that you can kind of shift gears midstream to adjust the balance to suit your strategy based on what missions are available and your goals in pursuing them. After everyone is settled on their upgrades, the active player gets to select a face-up mission from a display of cards. And then the polite rail game that this could have been derails and turns into something far more awesome than it has any right to be.

There are a couple of different types of missions and they all add something unique to the game. The most basic one is a simple “connect these cities” kind of thing where the player simply announces that they’ve done it and they claim the points on the card. Pretty boring, but it nets some critical honor and it provides some short-term goals in terms of building out a rail network.

A more active mission type is a basic pick-up-and-deliver outing where a player must start in a city that produces a particular type of good and take it to another that demands it. Standard train game stuff. However, each player has the option to either attempt the delivery, meaning they’ll be running their “transport” train, or they can run to disrupt the deliveries with their combat train. So it turns a simple delivery into a gauntlet run and a race at the same time. You not only have to beat your competitors, you may also have to fight attackers.

Execution is simple- every train rolls a D6 to move, and you get a bonus for moving on your own rails. You can’t turn around until you reach a city. Combat is likewise easy- it’s a matter of both trains in a space rolling a die and the player who wins by two, after figuring in technology bonuses, action cards such as Luminous Coal and Train Anchor (!), and applicable ramming modifiers. It’s a simple, one die roll resolution and the need to win by two creates a lot of really tense and exciting battles.