Transportation

The route-building game genre can be counted as the greatest passion of English game designer and history teacher Martin Wallace. And with La Strada, he has come up with a particularly clever road-building game. Everything – from the rules to the game play – is devilishly simple. The game lets players claim successes throughout the game, and turn-by-turn one reaches one or even multiple goals. But at the end, someone else wins? How did that happen?

The game features a variable game board, built up out of hex tiles that depict easily traveled flatland, forests, or hills. Before the start of the game, nineteen different settlements (ranging from cities to tiny villages) with varying victory point values are randomly placed onto those spaces featuring a gray symbol. Each player then places his or her starting marker onto a chosen flatland tile. The object here is of course to try to put your starting marker near as many high-value cities as possible.

The object of the game is to connect together as many settlements with your roads as possible, in order to get as many victory points as possible. The catch is that settlements award fewer and fewer victory points the more players connect to them. The cities are like pies: the more people want a slice, the smaller the slices have to be.

Building streets is very simple. One a player’s turn, he receives six gold pieces. Each street segment costs two gold to build over flatland, three over forest, and four over hills. Players can build as many segments as they can afford on their turn, provided that they end at a settlement and don’t intersect any other streets on the way. Put simply: players can’t end a street in the middle of nowhere and then keep building next turn. Streets have to reach their destination at the end of each turn.

Once a settlement has been reached, and then the player gets to put one of their trade markers on it. Note that streets can intersect each other only at the settlement locations. If a player doesn’t use up all of his gold on his turn, then he can save it for the next turn (where he will also get another six gold to play with again). Players aren’t allowed to spend more than ten gold pieces on their turn, though, so you can’t save forever.

The game ends when one player can’t build any more roads or doesn’t have any trade markers left.

Scoring then occurs. A scoring example for a city: The city is worth five victory points, but only if it was connected to by a single player. A doubly connected city is worth four points for each player, while a triply connected city is only worth three each. Cities connected to by four players are only worth two points. This decreasing point system also counts for smaller settlements, worth between four and two victory points. A nicely thought out sorting system ensures that the end game scoring doesn’t turn into a math exercise. Naturally, the player with the most victory points is the winner. In the case of a tie, then the tied player with the most gold left is the winner.

La Strada is a very simple game: build roads and connect cities. But it’s not that easy to get ahead with the scores. It’s every player’s dream to claim a fat five point city all to themselves – but a player who spends too much energy trying to protect an investment will find that his other road-building options become tighter.

[Text is from a preview by Spielbox]

Merchants & Marauders lets you live the life of an influential merchant or a dreaded pirate in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy. Seek your fortune through trade, rumor hunting, missions, and of course, plundering. Modify your ship, buy impressive vessels, load deadly special ammunition, and hire specialist crew members. Will your captain gain eternal glory and immense wealth - or find his wet grave under the stormy surface of the Caribbean Sea?

In Merchants and Marauders, players take on the role of a captain of a small vessel in the Caribbean. The goal is to be the first to achieve 10 "glory" points through performing daring deeds (through the completion of missions or rumors), crushing your enemies (through defeating opponents and NPCs in combat), amassing gold, performing an epic plunder or pulling off the trade of a lifetime, and buying a grand ship. While some points earned from performing various tasks are permanent, players earn points for amassing gold, which can be stolen or lost (or at least diminished) if their captain is killed. Points due to gold are hidden so there's some uncertainty about when the game will end.

A big component of the game is whether (or when) to turn "pirate" or remain as a trader or neutral party. Both careers are fraught with danger: pirates are hunted by NPCs (and other players) for their bounty and blocked to certain ports while traders are hunted by non-player pirates as well as their opponents and generally have to sacrifice combat capability for cargo capacity. Although players can kill each other, there is no player elimination as players may draw a new captain (with a penalty) so it's possible to come back from defeat.

Your small island is peaceful and prosperous – so prosperous that your tribe has grown beyond its ability to sustain you! Fortunately, being a peaceful people you have chosen not to fight over what little there is. Instead, you set out in your seagoing Wa’a (canoe) to fish and gather crops from the many nearby islands. The fertility goddess Haumea has blessed these islands, and they are rich with fruits, vegetables, and spices. It is a matter of pride to collect the finest harvest for the village. Can you win the race against time and the sea, and prove that you are the best gatherer of all?

In Tahiti the goal is to collect crops (coconuts, taro, bananas, spice) and fish from the surrounding islands to score points with bonuses for making full sets and acquiring the most of their family favorites which are hidden from the other players.

The game starts off with just your home island and its immediate neighboring islands. Players build up the archipelago of fertile islands with the guidance of Haumea for the first part of the game until all islands are in play. Players seed the islands each turn giving them some control over where crops replenish. Once the archipelago is formed, the late season is triggered when crops start becoming scarce, with players occasionally stopping an island from producing altogether. Although the late season may not be as good for crops, fishing becomes easier with bonuses given to the waters around some of the islands.
During all this the players travel by Wa’a from island to island using action points to collect the crops they want or can get to before the others take them. As the Wa’a fills, it becomes slower limiting the number of actions they have. There are also treacherous reefs around the islands that require you go around them or risk losing some of the crops aboard your Wa’a. At the end of the year, the one who most efficiently gathers food for their family wins.

After one hundred years in service, the Panama Canal still is one of the most important and impressive engineering achievements in modern times.

Built in 1914, it held a prominent role in the deployment of military vessels during WWI and in the conflicts that have followed. Nowadays commercial usage is the core business of the Channel; its economic impact is profound and has not only developed the region, but in fact helped define shipping throughout the world.

In the wake of the Canal’s opening hull designs were influenced accordingly; ships fell into three categories, those that could travel through easily and in groups (Feeder class), massive ocean going ships too big to enter the Canal (ULCV or Ultra Large Container Vessels), and the new standard - designed to the maximum limits of the Panama Canal. These ships are called PANAMAX.

In Panamax each player manages a shipping company established in the Colón Free Trade Zone. Companies accept contracts from both US coasts, China and Europe and deliver cargo in order to make money, attract investment and pay dividends. At the same time the players accumulate their own stock investments and try to make as much money as possible in an effort to have the largest personal fortune and win the game.

Panamax features several original mechanisms that blend together; an original dice (action) selection table, pickup-and-deliver along a single bi-directional route, a chain reaction movement system – “pushing” ships to make room throughout the Canal and a level of player interaction that is part self-interest, part mutual advantage and the freedom to choose how you play.

On their turn, players remove a die from the Action table to select Contracts and Load Cargo or Move ships until the pool of dice is emptied ending the Round. Over the course of three rounds these actions are blended during the turn to create a logistics network which each player uses to ship their cargo, minimize transportation fees and increase the net worth of their Company. Each Company has a limited amount of Stock that the players can purchase in exchange for investing – receiving a dividend each round. The questions for the players will be which companies are likely to yield higher dividends?

There's more to explore and several ways to win, but we ask that you join us at the table and celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Panama Canal with a session of Panamax!

Railways of the World (2009) is the new edition of the base game for Eagle Games' popular Railways of the World series, first published as Railroad Tycoon in 2005. It reimplements the original game with several improvements.

Revisit the early days of the Age of Steam as you begin with a locomotive (the venerable John Bull, the first locomotive to run in North America) and a vision (your Tycoon "mission" card). From there, build your budding railroad network into a vast empire. Connect New York to Chicago, earn the most money, develop bigger and faster locomotives and maybe even span North America and build the Transcontinental Railway!

Multiple expansions featuring different maps are available. Railways of the World is the new base game for the system and includes the engine placards, railroad tiles, train tokens, money, bonds, and other items that are needed in almost all the Railways of the World series. A gameboard depicting the eastern half of the United States is included in the base game, as well as a mounted map of Mexico.

This game is preceded by the designer's other Winsome train games: Age of Steam, Australian Railways, Volldampf, New England Railways, Veld Spoorweg, Lancashire Railways, and Ferrocarriles Pampas. Railroad Tycoon was the result of a collaboration with Glenn Drover, in which the mechanics and game-play of Martin Wallace's Age of Steam were simplified and streamlined and attractive over-produced components were added, in order to make Railroad Tycoon more appealing to less hardcore gamers and more accessible to a wider audience.

A revised reprint was published at the end of 2010 which made some component improvements, such as the addition of Railroad Operation cards for the Mexico map.

Complete series overview - The Railways of the World Series: Introducing the family members of the ideal medium-weight train game

Note: The RailRoad Tycoon board itself is gigantic (about 36x45 inches, 91x114 cm) and requires a huge table or playing on the floor.

Similar to:

Steam