Downtime isn’t too bad, even in a six player game. There’s no die rolling at all and usually a turn consists of laying down some track or upgrading a train or taking a new card. I have never been board waiting for a turn in Railroad Tycoon.

Player Setup:

The game supports two to six players but the more you have the better – Railroad Tycoon technically works as a two player game but you lose a lot of the confrontational aspects when you play with two (or even three). There are specific regions on the board which make up the usual commerce hubs: the Northeast (New York, Baltimore, etc.), the South (usually the hub around Charleston), and the Midwest (Chicago, Lexington). Because of this, in a two or three player game each player is left basically alone to build in their own little area without too much hassle from other players. However, in a four to six player game things get immensely more interesting as now you’ll usually have multiple players battling it out in each region, which not only makes the game more difficult but also vastly more entertaining.

Replay Value:

Due to the cubes the replay value is through the roof. The cubes make Railroad Tycoon a different experience each and every time you play it. Each game the cubes are randomly placed on the cities and therefore you never know what you’re going to get. It’s the Forrest Gump theory of game design. One game the northeast corner could be set up perfectly with red cubes just dying to get to New York while blues and yellow are sitting pretty waiting to go to Boston and Philly. Other games…you could get a draw where there’s purple all over the northeast, which dramatically alters the strategy of going to that region.

It’s a wonderful game mechanic and is a big reason why the game is so much fun – you just never know what kind of game you are going to get into until those cubes get slapped down on the board.

Rules:

The rules are well-written and fairly easy to understand. As usual, there are always going to be a few cases where something isn’t covered and you’re going to have to make a judgment call, but for the most part the game hums along nicely once everyone gets a hold of how it plays which usually doesn’t take more than one play-through.

In our group the biggest rule issue has to do with blocking other players. Each city has a defined number of “openings” for which a rail may be constructed and once they are full, that city is effectively blocked off. One dastardly tactic is to build a “dummy” link out of a city with no intention of finishing it just to screw over another player. This really isn’t covered in the rules and it can cause some heated debate if the ground rules are not laid out before a game. (We play that this isn’t in the spirit of the game and you must try to finish a link.)

A prime example of this happened when we played the game over the holidays. My father was trying to build a link from Louisville to Chicago (which takes more than one turn to do.) Chicago only had one opening left. I needed a link that hit Chicago for my own purposes so I constructed a link from the last Chicago outlet to Toledo. This not only closed off Chicago it left my father with a link that was effectively dead, costing him thousands in wasted rail tiles. Since I completed a link from Chicago to Toledo this was a perfectly legal move (although my father still isn’t speaking to me) but nowhere in the rules does it say that I couldn’t have just placed a tile or two with no real plans to ever complete the link to Toledo. Cases like this don’t pop up too often but just make sure you have a house rule one way or the other before starting.

The Bits:

Eagle Games, for the most part, did a wonderful job producing this game. The board is enormous. Our kitchen table is 46”x 46” and it takes up nearly every inch of space. In fact we have to get out a card table and set it up next to the board so that we have easy access to money, Share cards, etc. If you’re going to play Railroad Tycoon, get the table leaf out; you’ll most likely need it.

The only problem with the board, structure-wise, is that it has a tendency to warp a bit. After 20-some odd games ours is holding up well even though there is certainly some bending that we have to deal with. The other problem is that a good hunk of the map, particularly the southwest corner in and around the Dallas area, rarely, if ever, gets used. In fact, our group has never shipped a good to or from Dallas—even in a six player game.

That said—the board is beautiful. It comes in three fold out sections (seriously…it’s big) with wonderful artwork and a good contrast of colors. The plastic multi-colored train bits as well as the link counters are also top notch; a completed game of Railroad Tycoon is just fun to look at thanks to the various train colors, and rail tiles that wind their way across the board.