A Distorted Thursday is now a Friday, and a playtest of New England Rails

I got some games in on Thursday. The most interesting thing that happened was a playtest of New England Rails. In the morning, Eric told me that Walter Hunt wanted to meet me. It seems that he wanted me to try out his new "train" game. I took him up on the offer, visited Walter, and setup a time to try his game. We met again later that night when Stephen and Dave (from The Spiel podcast) joined Jef, me, and Walter and Gregory Pozerski (the co-designers of the game) for an excellent sushi dinner.

After dinner, we trekked it back to the Puffing Billy area of the convention center to try out what was supposed to be a two hour game. 4 hours later, I was tired and more than slightly annoyed. Heres the skinny on the game.

New England Rails is a route building game set in historical New England. The board is divided into five New England states. Each state is composed of different towns and cities that are connected by routes with varying costs. This is very similar to Power Grid. Your goal is to establish Depots in the various stations. You don't own the routes, but you must pay their cost when traveling over them to setup your Depots. Again, this is very similar to Power Grid.

At the end of every turn (there are 16 of them), you earn income by creating specific connections/routes, establishing depots in specific cities, and by starting up factories. The factories will earn you additional income if you have a depot in the city where the factory is located and if you have a depot in one of the three external market locations.

The amount of money that you earn is also subject to random events and an economic indicator. For example, if you are in a depression period, the various factories will pay out differently than if you were in a normal era.

You can also play cards on your opponents that will shut down their businesses. This may be a permanent shut down or it may only be for the turn.

What do I think? Well, it's sort of like Power Grid, without the auctions, and with an unhealthy dose of randomness. I didn't like it at all. The game took around 3.5 hours to play. I was in second place for a good chunk of the game, but it was close. I may have been able to pull out a win, but I was hit with about 3 cards in the second to the last turn that shut down a number of my businesses. This took me out of the game. It's ridiculous that cards and luck of the draw can shut someone out of a game that took this long to play.

The game also appears to be seriously unbalanced. The northern states are much more difficult to play with than the two southern states.

I know that the cards were added to the game to add historical context and theme to the game, but they do this at the expense of playability. It's especially evident with the incredible number of locations on the map. The font for the game is some fancy cursive, which essentially makes it unreadable when looking at the board from anything but a front on angle. And even then it is stupidly difficult to figure out where things are.

And it's fiddly. Man is it fiddly. You have to deal with about 5 or so different decks each turn. And keeping track of your income is hard since the numbers that you must work with are changing all of the time and they chose to use a bunch of different numbers.

Finally, the economics of the game just don't make sense. Many of the goal routes (that trigger the end of the game) would be incredibly expensive and don't merit their construction. Some of them cost upwards of $50 or more, and would only pay out an additional $6 or so per turn.

Anyhow, take this for what it's worth. It is a prototype, which means that things may change. But things really should change. And I don't think that they will. Sadly, the designer was not at all interested in what I might have to say about the game. When I did make some comments during the playtest, he responded that "It's not Age of Steam."

Well, I get that. And you don't need to insinuate that Age of Steam is the only game that I enjoy. Don't you dare insult me when I am taking time to demo and playtest a game for you. He lost out on some valuable insights for what could be a good game. But it won't be. Nobody wants to play a game that is this long, this fiddly, and this random. The decisions are pretty easy, and they are not at all rewarding.

I also played Mine yesterday and really enjoyed it. I wouldn't be surprised if Martin Wallace didn't have this game in mind when he designed Tinners' Trail.

And, I started (but didn't finish) a game of Kansas Pacific. Though I was a bit upset that we couldn't finish the game, I was super excited to find out about a new way to approach the game. I can't wait to try it again!