Boardgameboostmake some great acrylic pieces for Star Wars Rebellion and Azul. Tower Rex make some good dice towers.

Boardgameboostmake some great acrylic pieces for Star Wars Rebellion and Azul. Tower Rex make some good dice towers.

I've missed so many rules on Kingdom Death I started writing my own campaign management site to handle all of its steps and transitions. There's others that already exist yeah but it's more a project to keep my skills sharp.

I finally got a game of Tokyo Metro in last weekend!

I've always been interested in the idea of 18xx games, but my group is very much a medium to medium-rare crowd. When I saw the first Kickstarter for the Tokyo Series though, I loved the look of the centerpiece game, and its description as a "heavy economic game" using a subway map as the board didn't do anything to dissuade me.

It's essentially a worker placement game with stockholding elements, which meant there was about half an hour of rules explanation, but once you get a couple turns in, you know what each space does. This was the first game we played that really involved buying stock in other player's lines, so we definitely played suboptimally, but we came away with some good strategies for next time.

Long story short, I wouldn't say it's my favorite game, but I definitely enjoyed it, and I can see myself having the itch to play sometime in the future. I'm not sure if the worker placement "board" made up of cascading rows of cards has been done before, but it works very well here , and keeps the game on a relatively short timer (as one of my friends said, "I thought I could make some strategic long-term investments, but you really need to get a return quickly.")

The criticisms I've heard of the game have mostly been related to the cloth boards, which help the game fit into the nice, tiny little box, but really need the creases ironed out so as to not cause problems (especially on the income track. The map board will probably be fine, but we had a cylinder placed right on a crease that couldn't stand, so it's not perfect).

The only other major criticism I noticed was that the train movement phase was somewhat unwieldy, which is true, but my group almost made an event of it. Someone would move the trains and call out the stations it passed, another person would move the income track, another person would mete out the payments to those who earned them. Not too bad at all.

And, finally, I got my ass kicked, coming in fourth out of four. But more importantly, everyone else had as good a time as I did, including the friend who criticised games with "complicated rules" that made him "tune out" before we started. (but that just reinforces my philosophy that rule complexity isn't additive. A game with 15 simple actions isn't 5 times more difficult to grasp than Ticket to Ride, with its 3 simple actions. Strategically though...)

There really isn't a ton of information that's come out about Tokyo Metro since the Kickstarter delivered, but I'd recommend it. It's simple, as far as economic train games go, but satisfying.

Just finished watching a playthrough of City of Big Shoulders and it seems like it's partly an 18xx-style game (shares, stock market, dividends) and was wondering if any train-game fan backed it back in November, has PnP'ed it, and has tried it. What did you think? How's the game length? Better than Arkwright?

Just finished watching a playthrough of City of Big Shoulders and it seems like it's partly an 18xx-style game (shares, stock market, dividends) and was wondering if any train-game fan backed it back in November, has PnP'ed it, and has tried it. What did you think? How's the game length? Better than Arkwright?

Chaining combo's in Terraforming Mars (or any engine builder/tableau builder). Also, getting all those fantastically shiny cubes each turn to award your efforts.